culvert cleaning

[ratface]

I have a small culvert near the house on a county road, appx. 18 inches diameter by 30 feet. It is almost completely silted thru all but the top six inches is clear. I will contact the county but my neighbor said they were of little help with his culvert. Both my ends have been somewhat smashed by years of tractors and snow plows rolling over them. I will need to either bend them back open or cut away the smashed tops. I see some promising youtube videos of folks pulling a tire thru with a tractor. They never mention how they got a chain thru it to start. I was thinking of maybe pushing some steel pipe sections or maybe floating a cork with string thru to get the chain in place. Need something stiff, long, lightweight that won't get caught in the soft silt.

Has anyone actually pulled a tire thru a culvert?
Has anyone cut steel galvanized culvert and what did you use, a grinder or saw saw?

 

[DoubleO7]

You might be able to reform the ends with a bottle jack.


Pool noodles are cheap, might be on clearance about now.
What if you bought enough to go as long as the culvert.
Then put them on a rope and push them thru since there is water in the culvert to float the noodle train thru?
Then pull a chain/cable/snatch strap thru?
A tire between two long enough chains would let two tractors pull the tire back and forth.

 

[Russ from MN]

We have a problem up north with beaver plugging them, but the county just put in a new culvert. I had thought about welding enough rebar together to push through, and then attaching something like a grapple hook and pull it back out.

 

[leroy in ne]

Have used a Hi-lift jack ( some call them Handi-man jacks) to set in end and reform partly crushed ends. Also if the ditch on down stream end is cleaned to flow line a few good rains will wash a lot of material out of partly plugged culverts.

 

[ratface]

slicker than snot
Untitled URL Link

 

[crsutton81]

We normally take an excavator with a thumb and keep pushing and pulling a power utility pole through till it's clear. Have to size up the pole diameter according to the tile size.

 

[marloweg]

put two chains on it just in case it gets stuck so you can pull it back out

 

[Janicholson]

Local fire department might agree to blow it out for practice and a case of frosty malted beverages. Jim

 

[Dave G9N]

(quoted from post at 19:29:20 09/24/23) Local fire department might agree to blow it out for practice and a case of frosty malted beverages. Jim

would try the sewage treatment plant. They clean their lines with a sewer jet. There are small ones for pressure washers that you can look up easily. The nozzle has maybe 4 jets pointing to the side and a bit backwards.

The wastewater plant where I saw one was in Florida was the same basic design on a larger scale. It had a V4 engine and around a 2" hose.

The initiation for the new guy was to send him down a manhole into a lift station to watch for it and tell them when it was about to come through. There is a horrible noise down there in the dark, followed by a solid slug of 2" long American roaches. The roaches boil out of the pipe, then up and over everything like a scene from a horror movie. The newbie will launch out of the manhole like a minuteman missile trailing roaches like rocket exhaust. Hilarious, in retrospect anyway, so I was told by the victim. He was laughing, but I think he was still shaking.

 

[rustred]

it would be more interesting to see how he gets that cable through first.

 

[john in la]

Explain to me...
With all that standing water in the ditch what good did it do to clean that culvert out in the video????
It is just going to silt up again in short order.

My culvert has been down for over 40 years and has never silted over once.
And it is deep enough driving heavy equipment over it does not effect it.
Then again the parish does a pretty good job of keeping the silt dug out the ditches so the water will flow.

This does explain why I see some of you guys posting pictures of flooded fields after getting 3 inches of rain in 4 days.

 

[Geo-TH,In]

I don't know what it is called.
It's like a very powerful 4 cylinder pressure washer used to clean out sewer lines. You can rent one at a DIY rental.

I think it generates enough pressure it might remove flesh from your bones. I would not want to find out.

 

[PJH]

I've seen the tire trick work. We had contractors who installed a new culvert that silted before the contract was completed. It might take more horsepower/traction than you have available. I was always surprised that the tire didn't tear apart. marloweg has excellent advice - add a tail chain/cable so you can recover the tire when the lead cable fails or you spin out. If you have 6'' clear you could probably push a PVC pipe through to get your cable through the culvert. It was common to use 20' sections of 1/2'' steel pipe pounded through by a laborer to get the cable through the culvert. They would make a drive head so they didn't wreck the threads on the 1/2'' pipe and a point was also helpful. You might make the cork, thread, string, rope, cable idea work if you are working off of the clock. Wet silt works better than dry silt. The people that I worked for specified a minimum 15'' diameter culvert. Anything smaller is nearly impossible to clean. Cleaning a silted culvert is expensive when you add up the labor and equipment. A contractor will squeal like a pig when the subject is mentioned. Lots of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.

A backhoe trying to fix a crushed culvert end will end with a ruined culvert. A hydraulic jack is the solution for a crushed end if you don't mind a wrinkled end when you're done. The finished fix of a crushed end is never visually perfect.

That is my experience with silted culverts and crushed culvert ends.

Best wishes. It's a nasty dirty job.

 

[wp6529]

When I was installing some culvert on my (private) road, I noted that all the whitepapers I found said not to use less than 18" diameter for any culvert project. I also noted the many damaged, cumpled, rusting, clogged corregated steel culverts I saw around. I used the 18" double wall poly (ADS) culvert that has a smooth bore and so far in 7+ years its all still clear. At the time there also wasn't much cost difference between the basic steel and the double wall poly, both were around $300 / 20' section.

 

[Hobo,NC]

(quoted from post at 14:46:29 09/25/23) I don't know what it is called.
It's like a very powerful 4 cylinder pressure washer used to clean out sewer lines. You can rent one at a DIY rental.

I think it generates enough pressure it might remove flesh from your bones. I would not want to find out.

Jet pump are Jet it out. I called several years ago to get my driveway culvert Jetted out, they jetted every drive in site but not mine. I even inquired are you gonna jet mine they said yes.

The first of the summer my culvert had a washed out the state repaired it and told me I needed to replace the culvert. I have the new culvert and put the order in. Its my understanding the state jets them and replaces the culvert free you have to supply the culvert.

 

[ss55]

Is the culvert silting in because the ditch has silted in above the bottom of the culvert at both ends of the culvert? If the exit end of the culvert is below ground level you may need to clean out that side of the ditch before the culvert will scour clean again.

 

[PJH]

Yeah, in a proper installation the culvert flowline should match the ditch flowline but sometimes things change downstream. In road construction most of our silting problems were caused by a heavy prolonged rain and a nearly flat ditch flowline grade.

Which reminds me, one little town that we worked in was flat as a pancake. I always thought that it was originally settled by an itinerant band of frog hunters. Evaporation is not a good drainage plan, and I have to admit that there were some water holes in the ditches that we were not proud of.

 

[Brian G. NY]

(quoted from post at 03:29:20 09/25/23) Local fire department might agree to blow it out for practice and a case of frosty malted beverages. Jim

That is an excellent idea....since he said it is partially open, it should open up fairly easily.
Even fully plugged, if started on the downward end, it should clean out alright.
Sorta like a gigantic enema. LOL

 

[BarnyardEngineering]

All these ideas are well and good, but you have to remember that the municipality won't clear the culvert, so what makes you think you can get the fire department or water & sewer out there to blast the cluvert out? That's assuming there even is a water & sewer department.

Tire and chain is free. Renting some big machine costs money.

Tire and chain is today. Even if you could get the town, fire department, or water & sewer to do it you are at their mercy as to when... Could be months, or never.

My concern is using too large of a tire and yanking the culvert right out of the ground. I would definitely have a couple different tires, one smaller to start with, and a smaller tractor that might spin out before moving the culvert.

 

[JoeM(GA)]

We did the tire all the time I was growing up, the only thing Id add is to do it after a good rain, everything in the pipe soft makes it a lot easier. We had a couple of 10 x 1/2 pipes with a hook welded to the end to get the chain through.wed push them through with the rear blade and screw on another section if the pipe was longer