A case study for Elastec’s PACS 2000 vacuum trailer was published in the February 2020 issue of Dig Different magazine. The following is what appeared in the magazine.
Problem: Hydroexcavation in tight spaces is a challenge for large trucks. The city of Carmi (Illinois) Water Department needed a unit that could fit in tight areas to locate waterlines in a small neighborhood. The city knew the waterline location based off of maps and electronic sensors but were unable to hit the pipe when using a probe. A vacuum truck couldn’t turn into the neighborhood, and heavy equipment would cause too much damage to private property.
Solution: They chose the Elastec PACS 2000 trailer-mounted vacuum system. Workers were able to cut a small hole into the ground, clear roots and expose the waterline in mere minutes. It was discovered that a root as big as the line itself was running parallel to and directly on top of the waterline. This is why it could not be located by probing, and it also meant that using heavy equipment would have been very dangerous to the integrity of the utility.
Result: The system immediately saved the team many man-hours on-site, heavy-equipment hours and logistics, thousands of dollars in cleanup and remediation, and potentially tens of thousands in utility repair. “We would have spent a minimum of four hours on this site,” says Curt Hale of the city of Carmi Water Department. “With the help of this PACS 2000, we were only there about an hour. And that’s only because there were a lot of roots around the pipe, which is another issue on a job like this. If you were to use a backhoe to grab the roots and start ripping, it would pull that cast iron pipe out of the ground.”
