by Ecotech | Sep 24, 2017 | Excavation
Avoiding accidental hits to underground utilities is crucial during a project. Such possible accidental hits to avoid include power outages, fires, floods, utility damage, injuries to workers and bystanders, and inconvenient traffic disruptions, mandatory evacuation procedures, and costly interruption to businesses and construction projects.
When using Ecotech’s unique hydro excavation services, jobs are completed much faster than with conventional equipment, yielding in less material to be removed and the use of truly cost efficient tools for your next big project.
Additionally, Ecotech helps take care of the environment through the use of high-pressure water, precisely digging through soil with minimum disruption to the surrounding environment. Ecotech’s hydro excavator can dig through the toughest material with precision—such as rocky soil, clay, and frozen ground. As an added bonus, the hydro excavation truck can be up to hundreds of feet away from the dig site, decreasing ground restoration from heavy equipment and a larger footprint, as well as not worrying about runoff of sediment into sewer systems and waterways.
Using Ecotech’s hydro excavation services is revolutionary in avoiding accidental hits which risk harm to people, businesses, and their properties.
Interested in learning more about our hydro and air excavation services? To schedule your consultation, please call (717) 806-5460 or e-mail. We look forward to serving you!
by Ecotech | Sep 17, 2017 | Excavation
Ecotech specializes in hydro and air excavation throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast Region. Leveraging precision, safety, and efficiency, Ecotech is your excavation solutions partner. Our policy is to reach for the highest level of safety while complying with government health, safety laws, and regulations.
Defining Hydro Excavation
Hydro excavation is a non-mechanical, non-destructive process that combines pressurized water and a high flow of moving air to simultaneously excavate and evacuate soil and natural debris. Benefits of the hydro excavation process include:
Improved Safety:
Unlike metal shovels or backhoe buckets, high pressure water does not damage gas lines, electric lines, cable, pipes or other underground utilities. The safety of our employees, clients, public property, and environment is a top priority at Ecotech. Our employees receive extensive training in adherence to government health, safety laws, and regulations.
Lower Costs:
Hydro excavation saves you time and money. Unlike traditional excavation processes, hydro excavation provides more precision, reduces backfilling, and limits restoration costs. Costly fees associated with accidental hits are virtually eliminated.
Guaranteed Sustainability:
By using high-pressure water to precisely remove soil and debris, hydro excavation provides minimal disruption to the surrounding environment.
A leader in hydro excavation, Ecotech is your precise, safe, and efficient digging partner. To schedule your consultation, please call (717) 806-5460 or e-mail. We look forward to serving you!
by Ecotech | Sep 30, 2016 | Uncategorized
From: Dig Different Magazine Written By: Cory Dellenbach
Pennsylvania’s Ecotech Hydro Excavation removes 3,000 cubic yards from below a hospital for an expansion project.
Ecotech Hydro Excavation crews got a big challenge when they took on a job to expand a Philadelphia hospital. The job called for removal of 3,000 cubic yards of debris using 400-plus feet of hose and pipe, working in tight spaces and finding a way to break up the material.
“It was definitely a challenge,” says Ryan Frank, operations manager. “We just needed to think outside the box and get creative.”
The air excavation and hydroexcavation company based in Quarryville, Pennsylvania, wasn’t afraid to tackle the job, which spanned nine months. The company takes on work throughout Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and other areas of the Northeast.
“This has been one of our biggest and toughest jobs,” Frank says. “It was a lot of the worst-case scenarios of every aspect of what we do.”
Taking on the job
The downtown Philadelphia hospital was undergoing an expansion, but it couldn’t go any higher than its nine stories because of ordinances, and there was no room to expand laterally.
“The best option was to expand down,” Frank says. “There was an area in the center of the hospital that was just a crawl space and not a full basement, so that is where they would add extra offices.”
The general contractor was given the option of building a temporary hallway within a permanent hallway; laborers would hand-dig the soil into 50-gallon drums. The drums would then be carted out of the building and emptied into a dumpster. After the drums were cleaned out and brought back in, the process would repeat.
“One of their guys thought about vacuum excavation and they contacted us,” says Frank. “A total of 3,000 cubic yards of dirt, rocks and bricks had to be removed. Our estimate for the job was around $650,000 and the bid for doing it with the drums came in at $1.3 million, just to get the material out of the hospital. So there was a substantial cost savings going with vacuum excavation.”
Ecotech crews determined that the only way to get to where the excavation would take place was through crawl spaces and utility access areas in the lower level of the hospital. “We set up the vacuum truck outside at their loading dock area and ran 400 feet of pipe and hose into the center of the hospital,” Frank says.
The company’s GapVax HV-56 hydroexcavator was parked on the opposite side of the road away from the hospital, and its boom was stretched over the road to allow cars to pass underneath. The hose was positioned over scaffolding on the sidewalk closest to the hospital, giving pedestrians a safe place to walk.
A need for stronger pipe
Crews used 6-inch PVC pipe connected to 6-inch hoses from the hydroexcavator to the center of the hospital.
In the first few days on the job, workers were already running into issues. “Our initial problem was that everywhere there was a bend in the pipe, the pipe would want to blow apart from the rocks,” Frank says.
Crews also had two elevation changes to contend with: a 17-foot drop into the work area, and a 20-foot upward incline out of the work area. “Trying to keep productivity up in that long-distance remote excavation was a big factor,” Frank says. “One thing we found is that the elevation changes made a tremendous difference.”
Debris going down the hose became more of an adversity than the material going back up. “You had to have so much cfm to get the material to pull 400 feet, but you couldn’t have the cfm up too high,” Frank says. “When that material would hit the downslope it would come screaming down that hill, build up too much velocity and damage everything it came into contact with.
“Anything plastic or metal on the hose was just wearing through because the material was dry and very abrasive. The pipe also had to be light enough for two men to carry it through a crawl space.”
To deal with these challenges, crews switched to 5/8-inch thick-walled pipe made for waterline installation and used heavy rubber elbows to make the bends.
Finding easier ways to work
Finding a way to break up dirt to vacuum was another challenge.
“An air knife wasn’t a possibility and other air-spade tools like jackhammers were incredibly slow,” Frank says. “We ended up finding an electric mini-excavator that we pushed through the hallways of the hospital on a wood skid and dolly.”
Crews connected the mini-excavator to the available power source and as one worker used the machine to break up dirt, another vacuumed it.
“The GapVax kept up,” Frank says. “The material we were able to pull out of the building was going faster than what we could get broken up, so the truck and mini-excavator worked well in tandem.”
Ecotech was allowed just one truck on the job site. Two vacuum boxes were set up near the truck.
“Once we had the material in the truck, all we had to do in the middle of the day was switch hoses and move it to one of the two vacuum boxes,” Frank says. “We didn’t have to move the truck and we could just keep on working.”
Gaining confidence
The new offices in the hospital’s basement were completed in late 2015.
“Inside the hospital no one even knew Ecotech was there working or that there was construction going on,” Frank says. “We all worked really hard and did a great job. All parties involved were impressed and happy with the end result.
“More than anything it gave us confidence knowing there wasn’t a job we couldn’t successfully do.”
To see the full article click the link below:
http://www.digdifferent.com/editorial/2016/09/hydroexcavation_contractor_gets_creative_on_project_in_downtown_philadelphi
by Ecotech | May 17, 2016 | Excavation
From: Trenchless Technology
Written By: Tisyn Milne
While the One Call System is a good starting point to identify a utility’s location, properly exposing the infrastructure is the only sure way to know where it truly lies, and how the pipe or wire has been run. With millions of kilometers of buried utilities beneath Canada’s surface and records inaccurate or incomplete, it is surprising that there is not more property damage and personal injury occurring every time somebody puts a shovel in the ground. Even backyard landscaping can cause millions of dollars in damage when utility lines get hit, service is interrupted and expensive repairs have to be undertaken.
One can only imagine the ten-fold risk and additional expense when it comes to large scale infrastructure projects taking place across Canada. In a 2011/2012 report by Statistics Canada it was revealed that 40 percent of all damages to underground infrastructure occur due to a failure to notify, a frightening 84 percent of damages cause a service interruption, and 75 percent of all damages are due to outside force through usage of a backhoe or mechanical excavation.
In recent years, many initiatives have focused on mandating safer installation, exposure, maintenance and repair of buried utilities. While the One Call System is a good starting point to identify a utility’s location, properly exposing the infrastructure is the only sure way to know where it truly lies, and how the pipe or wire has been run. This is where hydro excavation comes in as an essential tool of visually locating utilities to mitigate the risk of striking underground infrastructure.
With current government regulation prohibiting the use of mechanical means to dig within 45 cm of buried cables or pipes, hydro excavating is an ideal method to expose underground infrastructure, drill pile holes, trench slots, install signs and poles and conduct landscaping and potholing.
A Vital Industry
What is standard practice in Canada today, began more than 50 years ago in the Alberta oil and gas fields where hydro excavation machines were used to ‘daylight’ buried gas pipes and other utility lines. Cold weather, and even permafrost, would only allow year-round excavation by using heated water, which made Hydro Excavators all the more popular.
When customers began modifying vacuum trucks and sewer cleaners for hydro excavation use in the 1970s and 1980s, and even mounted vacuum components on all-terrain vehicles to get into remote locations the demand was recognized and the manufacturing of dedicated truck-and-trailer-mounted hydro excavation units began in the 1990s due to the growing demand.
The millennium hit, and hydro excavation was already widely accepted and used by utility contractors across Canada for locating and non-destructive digging. It was around that time, that Illinois-based Vactor Mfg. introduced its first dedicated HXX Hydro Excavator as a purpose-built unit and became a leading manufacturer for this ever-growing market.
Today, hydro excavation is considered to be a best practice by municipalities, contractors and public utility organizations alike. As the HydroVac Alliance of Ontario (HVAO) together with the Ontario Regional Common Ground Alliance (ORCGA) indicate in a recent report, the size of Ontario’s hydrovac market has grown significantly since the first custom-built hydro excavators appeared. The associations estimate that there are between 450 and 500 units in operation across Ontario responsible for a total annual revenue of $180 million to $200 million.
Extremely versatile, hydro excavators can be seen virtually on every street corner where they drill holes for fence posts, poles and signs or conduct daylighting of underground gas pipes. And once you see a hydro excavator in action, you will never forget the efficiency and power this unit demonstrates while completing a job. A recent study by the City of London says it best: “…The hydrovac unit effectively replaced the hand digging requirement being completed in 1/3 of the time and with 1/2 of the crew. The cost of using a shovel and backhoe compared to a hydrocvac unit on the identical job is 4.1 times greater.”
Born To Run
As hydro excavation becomes more and more popular, the importance of zero downtime applies to most hydrovac companies to ensure they can keep up with the day-to-day demand for their services. Industry veterans such as the Toronto-based PGC Services Inc. (PGC), a member of the Powell Group of Companies, trust a full service shop of the likes of Joe Johnson Equipment for new purchases, rental units, used equipment and to regularly service and maintain their hydro excavating equipment.
Regular inspections do not only benefit operators and customers, increase safety and are better for the environment, but they also lead to higher resale and trade-in values based on the service history.
In search of a safe, cost-effective and non-disturbing option to expose underground infrastructure when performing an excavation project, the past 30 years have seen a major shift to move from backhoe digging to hydro excavating. Associations such as the Canadian Common Ground Alliance (CCGA), the Centre for Advancement of Trenchless Technologies (CATT) and the members of the HVAO have become important advocates in promoting safe digging procedures, and with the increasing use of hydro excavation, Canada leads the pack as a nation that knows how to safely deal with its underground infrastructure.
by Ecotech | Mar 22, 2016 | Uncategorized
Next time that you get stuck in traffic, think about the traffic jam that is below you. There are over 35 million miles of in use and abandoned utility lines that are causing a huge traffic jam underground. Between the labyrinth of pipes, conduits and cables, it is difficult to tell what is dead or alive, because most utilities that are no longer in use remain underground.
Traditional digging can yield unwanted surprises and deadly consequences — especially in older parts of the cities where old utility lines (such as water and sewer) are still in use and undocumented. When coming across these undocumented lines, all work must stop until workers know exactly if the line is live and if it is safe to dig. This delay costs time and thus costs money. While newer plastic pipes are often color-coded to indicate their function, older pipes were often made of similar materials, making them difficult to differentiate, adding even more to the confusion to the underground maze of utilities.
There are so many chances to get it wrong, to dig near unmarked (or incorrectly marked) lines: About 400,000 utility excavations occur every day across the United States, making it incredibly difficult to put something new underground without having some sort of conflict with other utilities underground.
The 811 “call before you dig” free service, is in place throughout all 50 states to help identify and locate underground utilities to prevent damage, injury and death; but industry experts say the system isn’t faultless.
The latest utility locating technology such as electromagnetic locating devices and ground-penetrating radar, have their limitations. Buried steel railroad, streetcar tracks, old brick or stones can all interfere with the locating devices making it difficult to know for sure if there is or is not an underground utility.
Records of what is underground and what is live are many times incomplete or nonexistent. In the past, recording what was underground was not as effective as it is today. Today, utility companies take their responsibilities very seriously when it comes to marking and protecting their utilities from strikes, but the utilities that were not marked in the past, are still present. No matter how accurate lines are marked going forward, the lines of the past will most likely always be there due to the high cost of removal.
It’s common to assume hand digging with a shovel is the safest way to dig when digging around known utilities, but this notion is not entirely true. Almost 20% of utility line hits are caused by shovels. Vacuum Excavation, whether using water or air, is the ONLY safe way to dig. The high pressure water or air is at a psi that will cut the soil with razor like precision, but is not strong enough to damage utilities. Each year, millions of miles of new utilities are put underground, joining a mix of old and new pipes that snake through the ground at varying configurations and depths, increasing the amount of utilities and likeliness to hit something using traditional excavation methods.
Works Cited:
http://goo.gl/pcU57J
http://goo.gl/l0AOUo
