Well, wood is green, isn’t it?

I recently heard about a technology which strikes me as very odd.

Wooden sewer pipes. 

The idea sounds almost laughable, but as a friend who sells real estate told me recently, there are a number of homes with these pipes, and when they are found during inspections, all hell breaks looks and the price of the home has to be renegotiated.

They are called “Orangeburg” pipes, and here’s a nostalgic old advertisement:

 

Here’s a cross section of a deteriorating Orangeburg “cardboard pipe“:

Perhaps I am old-fashioned (er, obviously not old-fashioned enough!), but it would never occur to me to make pipes out of wood or cardboard. It’s amazing is that some of them have lasted as long as they seem to have.

I can see why people bought them, for people then as now love to hear about how wonderful “new” things are.

I only hope that some of the “green” technology being promoted today isn’t at least as shoddy.


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14 responses to “Well, wood is green, isn’t it?”

  1. Tom Avatar
    Tom

    My house, built in 1947 had these, they lasted at least 50 years before needing to be replaced. Many, many houses in my neighborhood built at the same time still have these pipes in the ground, 65 years later. I could only hope that the PVC it replaced lasts as long.

  2. Sgt. Mom Avatar

    I remember reading, in an account of the London Blitz, about the woes of plumbers and electricians in having to repair bomb-damaged systems when the buildings in the streets above were demolished. One of those was about a length of water-main in an old part of London which turned out to have been made of segments of wood fitted together, which was so old (yet still had been functioning) that no one had ever seen the like. And no one could make any guess about exactly how old it was – only that it WAS very old.

  3. V Avatar
    V

    @Sgt Mom:

    Actually, it could have been anywhere from the 1850’s to the 1920’s. At least if you follow the American plumbing time line. If I recall, the Romans used clay and brick. 🙂

    OUr house when I was in high school had water pipes made out of wood. Actual plank wood, though, not wood fiber.

    When we got our pipe to the street dug out to be replaced, the men from the Water Department dug down, and found square wood pipes that looked like railroad ties. As soon as they saw this, they dropped their tools and left, saying that they were not qualified to do the work.

    …Then the historical commission came around with volunteer student archaeologists from the University of Michigan, under the care of a professor.
    Excavation proceeded apace, at the speed of archaeology, and not construction.

    Just removing the pipes took most of the summer. Fortunately we could stay with grandma so we could do the normal things of life. To be fair, they eventually were able to route a glorified garden hose from the trunk line to our house while they completed excavation.

    Then both the University and the Water department had a large row about who the pipes belonged to. In the end, they turned up on display at the Water Department’s corporate offices. If I recall, they also have to let folks from the University (and the local historical commission) study them occasionally.

    I believe that they gave us the price of
    the excavation in exchange for the pipes.

  4. V Avatar
    V

    I forgot to mention that the two sides of the pipes were held together with metal straps. I think the wood was either cedar or birch. Both have interesting qualities in regards to rot and will be preserved for a very long time submerged in water.

  5. Bobnormal Avatar
    Bobnormal

    I ran into this stuff in colorado, doing sewer cleanouts, and if you hit that stuff with a Snake, it’s all over, sometimes we couldn’t tell what happened until the snake popped up out of the ground.
    Complete replac3ement, pissed off a lot of customers,
    Bob

  6. Jennifer Krieger Avatar
    Jennifer Krieger

    well, it looks like we can hope that our “green” equipment IS as “shoddy”!
    Fifty years, two hundred years, that’s a long time.
    Jenny

  7. Andy Avatar
    Andy

    And here’s an article reporting on wooden water pipes still in use in the US.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/us/18water.html?_r=0

  8. LittleRed1 Avatar
    LittleRed1

    My parents’ house in Texas had those. It was built in the early 1940s and the Orangeburg pipes lasted until the late 1990s. One big problem is that roots of a lot of the trees in that area will find the paper pipes and get into the material in search of water.

  9. Amiable Dorsai Avatar
    Amiable Dorsai

    Dunno about sewer pipes, but there are still some wooden drinking water pipes in Chicago.

  10. andy Avatar
    andy

    The use of wooden pipes has a long, storied history… Take a tree, drill a hole in it, win!

    http://www.sewerhistory.org/grfx/components/pipe-wood1.htm

  11. Bob Mulroy Avatar

    I remember encountering wooden conduits in Virginny. You put cypress in the ground, It’ll be there for a while.

  12. Southern Man Avatar

    Oh, yeah. My initiation to home-owning was digging up forty feet of collapsed orangeburg and replacing it with plastic. Yippee.

  13. Choey Avatar
    Choey

    When I was working construction we replaced a lot of Orangeburg pipe. All of it was at least 50 years old. For non-pressurized systems (sewer pipe) we replaced it with Schedule 40 PVC which has an underground life expectancy rating of–hang on to your hat– 50 years. I guess everything old is new again.
    I also saw a watermain blowout in DC. When it blew it had such force that it blew up out of the ground and blew cars into the air. When they dug it up they discovered the main was made of hollowed out logs and had been laid 150 years ago.

  14. Linda Rossi Avatar

    Orangeburg can absolutely complicate your life! I call it short-term thinking at its worst…. kind of like using corrodable metal to store oil under the ground…. In my neighborhood lots of people had it, and some did not… all houses built around the same time… Better to know though, rather than wait for what can back up into your house. Linda Rossi, Realtor, Portland, Oregon http://www.propetyblotter.com