Unique bypass installed along Mississippi River

A crew in New Orleans, Louisiana recently finished a unique and challenging project for Atmos Energy alongside the Mississippi River levee. Their job was to install 1700 feet of temporary 2-inch steel and 4-inch plastic pipe for the Corps of Engineers who are in the process of building a new flood wall. The old line needed to be retired because it was obstructing the construction process of the flood wall, and the temporary line Miller installed will eventually be replaced with a permanent line once the flood wall construction is complete. An interesting twist to the installation of the temporary line is that the line had to be installed above ground. It is against the law in Mississippi to dig anywhere near the levee.

With the Mississippi River levee on one side of the road and railroad tracks on the other, installing the bypass pipe had to be a carefully plotted process. The first step of the project was to bore under the roadway and bring the pipe to the surface at the base of the levee (since digging near the levee is prohibited). Then our crew laid 2 lines (2-inch steel and 4-inch plastic) above ground for a quarter of a mile along the contour of the levee. To complete the tie-in, the pipes were then bored back under the roadway. To protect the pipeline laid along the levee, special fill dirt was hauled in for cover, along with straw matting and seed to minimize erosion. Adding further complexity to the project, after the old line was retired, grout had to be pumped through a section of the 2-inch steel line to seal it. This was difficult to complete because the grout mixture was special in nature and was hard to find. Also, it was extremely rare to successfully pump grout the length of 2100 feet through a 2-inch line. The small learning curve proved to be a piece of cake for the crew consisting of Barney Hickman, Calvin Bender and Thomas Hedges, who completed the entire project without a hitch in three and a half weeks.