Public Works Sewer Repair, Schools, City Sites & Public Agencies

Underground sewer and drain repair on public property: school campuses, city buildings, yards, parks, libraries, community centers and agency-owned facilities across the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles.

Sewer line repair at a public site

Cones and caution tape up, excavation shored, site fenced before the crew leaves for the day.

Scope we bid

We are an underground specialist, and the list below is all of it.

• Sewer main repair and replacement on agency property
• Lateral and building sewer replacement, cleanout installation
• Point repairs on cracked, offset, bellied or collapsed segments
• Trenchless rehabilitation, cured-in-place lining and pipe bursting where open trench is not practical
• Root cutting and root intrusion removal
• Hydro-jetting of mains, laterals and grease-loaded kitchen lines
• Grease interceptor and grease line service on cafeteria and kitchen sewers
• Cast iron, clay and Orangeburg pipe replacement
• Storm drain and area drain line clearing and repair
• Manhole and structure repair, cleanout and access point installation
• Excavation and backfill for underground pipe, with surface restoration
• Emergency response for sewer backups and main line stoppages

School district work

School sewers fail in specific ways and on a specific calendar, and both matter to how the work gets planned.

The failures

Campus sewer lines are old, long, and shallow under decades of added asphalt and portable buildings. The three that generate most calls are kitchen lines loaded with grease from cafeteria service, restroom mains blocked by paper and foreign objects at the start and end of the school year, and root intrusion from mature campus trees sitting directly over clay pipe. A single blocked main can close a restroom block or a kitchen and, with it, part of a school day.

The calendar

We schedule around the campus, not the other way around. Repair work happens on nights, weekends, holiday breaks and summer wherever the failure allows waiting. Emergencies obviously do not wait, and in those cases we work to isolate the affected building and keep the rest of the campus in service.

Being on a campus

Fingerprinting and background clearance for staff on site, badging and sign-in at the front office, escort where your district requires it, tool and trench security around children, and no open excavation left unfenced at the end of a shift. If your district has its own facilities standards, send them with the scope and we will work to them.

City and agency facilities

Yards, corporation yards, parks and recreation buildings, libraries, community centers, fire stations and municipal office buildings all run on underground sewer that was put in decades ago and has been patched since. The work is the same as school work with a different set of access rules: public buildings often cannot close, so we plan around business hours and public access and not a school bell.

Park and open-space lines add their own problem, long runs, irrigation-fed root growth, and access points that have been buried or paved over. Locating comes before digging, and we camera and locate the line first in place of guessing at trench position.

How we repair it

There are three ways to fix a failed sewer line, and the right one depends on the pipe's condition and what is on the surface above it. We camera the line before recommending any of them.

On a campus or a park, the surface column is usually what decides it. Trenching across a playground, a finished parking lot, a poured walkway or a landscaped area costs the agency far more in restoration than the pipe work itself, so lining or bursting is worth pricing wherever the pipe still allows it.

Surface restoration

The repair is not done when the pipe is done. Concrete walkways, asphalt, curb, gutter, turf and hardscape get put back to the condition they were in, to the jurisdiction's standard where the work was in a right of way. We do not hand a site back with a patch of loose dirt and a note about who to call next.

Prevailing wage and compliance

• DIR registration. registered with the California Department of Industrial Relations to bid and perform public works. Number provided with any quote.
• Prevailing wage. paid at the applicable determination on covered work
• Certified payroll. filed electronically to the state on projects that require it, and to your agency on the schedule your contract sets
• Licensing. CSLB #720343, active, with the pipe trade classification the work requires
• Insurance. general liability, commercial auto and workers' compensation, with additional insured endorsements issued to your agency on request
• Small business status. Los Angeles County Local Small Business Enterprise
• Permits. we pull the plumbing and excavation permits the jurisdiction requires and coordinate inspection
• Close-out. permit sign-off, certified payroll, and camera verification of the finished line where inspection is in scope

Emergency response on public property

A sewer backup in a school restroom or a city building is a health problem before it is a maintenance problem, and it usually happens outside business hours. Our emergency line is answered around the clock. From the Northridge yard most Valley sites and much of Los Angeles are a short run. We arrive with the camera and the jetter on the same truck, so the usual sequence, clear the stoppage, find out why it happened, tell you what the permanent fix costs, happens in one visit rather than three.

Purchase orders and paperwork get sorted afterward. We have never held up a response over a signature.

Subcontracting to primes

If you hold a facilities, maintenance or JOC contract with a district or agency and the underground sewer scope is outside what your firm self-performs, that is exactly the piece we take. We carry the pipe trade license, the excavation equipment, the jetter and the camera. Send us the sewer line items during your pricing period and we will return a sub quote on your timeline.

Back to Municipal & Public Works. Residential and commercial work is listed under Services.