A product line of ISCO Industries, Snap-Tite is marketed to state and local agencies on the basis that in-house crews can do the installations themselves. “They don’t have to put out for a bid process, so there’s a big savings in that,” says Hundley, Snap-Tite’s director of sales. And there’s undoubtedly a need, he relays. “You ask, ‘Do you have any bad culverts in your district or your county?’ and the answer is, ‘Do I ever! Of course, I do,’” he says. “These things were originally put in in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and they have design life of 30 to 40 years, so that design life has long come and gone. The solution to that has been historically to just dig them up, and that is such a big inconvenience that what ends up happening is the agencies just don’t do anything. They fix them when they fail, when the road collapses and everything gives way off the side.”

But an agency’s maintenance budget, already squeezed in this recession era, tends to go first to needs that are publicly both visible and prioritized, such as mowing, salting and guardrail replacement, says Hundley. “You take a small town. It might cost them $25,000, even if they use their own crews to fix this. That might be a $100,000 saving, but they didn’t have $25,000 extra to start with.” And, in the meantime, guardrails are missing, grass is growing and, he says, the public is howling.

Then again, the emergency alternatives to a no-dig solution like Snap-Tite are even more inconvenient to the public. “The only other way to fix this is to pull these culverts up, pull them out and put new ones in,” says Hundley, “and that stops traffic, shuts down roads, and all those things the public doesn’t want. Cost-wise, you’re looking at five to ten times more to do that type of work, versus just fixing it without having to dig it up.”

Meeting the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) requirement for culvert repair, the Snap-Tite lining system uses a heavy-duty plastic – high-density polyethylene (HDPE) – pipe on which a male and female joint is milled. The pieces “literally snap together” with a simple “chain-and-come-along” apparatus already found in stock at most city, county and state work sheds. “Once it’s snapped together on the side of the road or in the ditch, you literally take that stick of pipe and insert it into the old culvert that’s rusted out or that concrete structure that’s shifted, given way or worn out,” says Hundley. The space between the old and new pipe, and any other voids created over the years, are then filled in with a milkshake-type grout mix, injected via PVC tubes inserted as access points as the gaps at each end of the culvert are first sealed up. “That mix will find its way through all those holes and fill in all the areas that have been washed out.”

In addition to the official 100-year lifespan of HDPE, the culvert insert provides a slicker alternative to the traditional corrugated piping and, “because we go down in size when we fit a new one into an old one, the flow of runoff is increased.”

For product info, visit: culvert-rehab.com