How trenchless went from the mains to your lateral

Where it started

The first cured-in-place liner was installed in a brick egg-shaped sewer in London in 1971, the idea of an engineer who had been asked to fix a leaking duct under a mushroom farm without digging it up. Within a decade the method was licensed around the world and American utilities were lining mains under streets they could not afford to close. Pipe bursting followed from the British gas industry in the early 1980s, where cast iron gas mains were replaced by pulling polyethylene through them. Both methods were municipal before they were anything else.

The move to private property

Through the 1990s and 2000s the equipment got smaller. Lining rigs that had needed a trailer and a crew of six shrank to a van and two technicians; static bursting units that could be lowered into a pit by hand appeared. Suddenly a four-inch residential lateral was a reasonable job, and plumbers who had spent their careers digging began buying liners. By the 2010s most metro areas had at least a few contractors offering trenchless lateral work, and lateral lining had become a standard option in municipal inflow-and-infiltration programs, sometimes with cost-sharing for homeowners.

What the trends mean now

• Aging systems. The clay and cast iron laid during the postwar building boom is reaching the end of its life across the country at once. Demand for replacement is rising faster than the willingness to dig up streets and yards.
• Utility programs. More cities require or subsidize lateral repair, and more treat private laterals as part of the system's infiltration problem.
• Point-of-sale inspections. A growing number of jurisdictions require a lateral inspection — and in some cases a repair — at the time a property is sold, which has made the camera inspection a routine part of a real estate transaction.
• Materials. UV-cure fiberglass liners, styrene-free resins and spray-applied systems for under-slab work have widened what can be done without a trench.
• Qualification. With more contractors offering trenchless work, the difference between an experienced installer and a plumber with a new liner kit matters more. That is the gap programs like CIPP Verified are meant to close.

For a property owner the practical upshot is simple: a failed sewer line is no longer an automatic excavation, and a contractor who proposes one without showing the footage is a generation behind.