Rehabilitating a 155-Year-Old Arch Shaped Brick Sewer under the Ross Bay Cemetery with Glass Reinforced Polymers: Fid-Bau Portal

Rehabilitating a 155-Year-Old Arch Shaped Brick Sewer under the Ross Bay Cemetery with Glass Reinforced Polymers

Macey, Chris / Braun, Adam / Leydon, Eric / Brady, Mike / Coghlan, Carla

The City of Victoria, BC, Canada, has brick sewer infrastructure that was originally constructed in the early 1860s. While they were first used as combined sewers the inventory has long been converted to storm sewer service. It includes over 10 km of largely non-circular cross sections including egg and arch shape cross sections ranging in size from 914 mm × 610 mm (36″ × 24″) to 2100 mm × 2855 mm (84″ × 114″) (H × W). The inventory traverses a wide range of native soils ranging from running cohesionless soils with a high water table to competent cohesive soils and rock cuts all through a mature urban neighborhood. A 15 year upgrading program commenced in 2012 and continued in 2016. This paper reviews the design and rehabilitation in 2016 of a particularly challenging 1585 mm wide by 990 mm high (63″ × 40″) brick arch sewer located under a fully occupied cemetery (Ross Bay Cemetery) with a number of 300–600 mm (12″–24″) high steps in it. After a careful review of alternative rehabilitation methods, it was decided to utilize segmental glass reinforced polymer (GRP) panels to balance design objectives of minimizing construction footprint and the ability to adopt a conservative structural design approach without compromising economics. The design investigated a range of applied loads models and the use of both bonded and un-bonded lining products in an effort to develop an optimum structural section without compromising constructability of a very complex section with even more complex access logistics.