 The Roads Division's small specialist
<<Sounds of camera operators talking>> Narrator Says: You’ve heard the saying ‘it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it’. <<more sounds of camera operators talking.>> Narrator Says: The truth is this job is also wet, cramped and downright dangerous. That’s why people don’t do it anymore. Whenever the King County Road Services Division needs to check out a roadside culvert or any other area that’s too small or too dangerous for a human to check, they send in a small specialist. Frank Overton, a Supervising Engineer with the Roads Division says the so-called robotic crawler comes in very handy in these situations. King County Supervising Engineer Frank Overton Says: This robotic crawler, as you can see by the size of the pipe, and the potential safety issues of associated with having somebody enter that pipe, which is basically prohibited by Labor and Industries. We needed the robotic camera as a tool to enter the pipe and give us information that isn't really available by looking at the surface. So it's a very useful tool in accomplishing that task of inspecting this and giving us information that we don't have readily available to us in making our engineering decisions about how to fix this culvert or how to address the repair of the roadway above. Narrator Says: In this case, the culvert and roadway in question are along Southeast Newport Way in Bellevue. An early December rainstorm sent a surge of water and debris through the small culvert that runs along Newport Way. About 85 feet in, the culvert gave way causing a large sinkhole on the road’s shoulder. The sinkhole is what led crews to believe the culvert may be damaged. But damage to the culvert wasn’t the only concern. King County Supervising Engineer Frank Overton Says: I’m standing over where the sinkhole was and again the culvert pipe is down 65 feet below me. And part of the reason, this is just adjacent to the shoulder of the roadway, part of the reason it's important is that we've got all these communication lines in here, we've got traffic, we've got water and sewer lines through there, we've got aerial power. And besides traffic there are a lot of things that are happening in the roadway that are important to preserve and for safety reasons we don't want a 24-inch waterline collapsing and causing more damage. Narrator Says: Upon running the robotic camera through the culvert, the suspicions were confirmed. Exposed rebar in several areas and a large hole in the bottom of the culvert, damage that certainly required repair. Frank says it’s much easier to calculate a game plan after seeing the damage from just inches away. King County Supervising Engineer Frank Overton Says: And it pretty much gave us the exact location of where the damage was. There's other damage along the culvert that's been generated based on material moving through. The culvert is at a 10 percent slope so there's a substantial amount of rock and sand coming through and in portions of the culvert you can see exposed rebar, damage to the flow line of the culvert and those things lead us to generate an engineering solution that we need to get a new pipe in here to address the flows to keep from experiencing further damage until we can engineer a permanent solution for this area. Narrator Says: More investigation will be needed to confirm whether the hole in the culvert directly caused the road to sink. The solution, at least in the short term, will be to fuse these large polyethylene pipes together and pull them through the entire culvert. Frank says a more permanent future solution could be a larger culvert to handle the water and debris. But until then, it’s nice to know he and other engineers can get a close-up view of damage in dangerous places, from the safety of a utility truck.
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