Montecito Mudslide
On Friday, January 12, National Plant Services was contacted by a representative of Montecito Sanitary District. The District asked if National Plant could mobilize to their City for condition assessment of sewer lines, clean manholes that were charged to the top with mud, internally cap laterals from houses that were washed away or red-tagged, repair broken lines, and assist their crew as needed.
Mobilizing the Crews
On Wednesday, January 17th, two full crews and superintendent mobilized to Montecito to begin working that night. Each crew contained a combination of a Jet/Vacuum, CCTV Truck, Water Truck, and utility truck. The crew started work at 6:30pm and didn’t finish their shift until 6am the next day. By 6:30am Thursday, another full crew had come up from Long Beach with plans for a fourth crew on Friday. By Saturday, there were 17 techs working 12 hour shifts for Montecito Sanitary.
Working to Restore
There was no power in the town the first few nights. National Plant brought generators and light stands to illuminate the work areas. All of the roads were covered in mud. They had just recently been scraped down to make driving possible by dozers and wheel loaders that lined the streets.
There were boulders the size of cars laying in the streets, full size fallen trees lining what used to be driveways. There was no water service on the north side of town, so the water truck was getting water on the south side of the 101 freeway to provide water for the jet/vacs.
During the day, the crews were working next to Edison and So Cal Gas crews trying to restore services to the area. National Plant found 8” main lines that had 7” rocks in them. Manholes were full of mud which meant the lines were full of mud as well. After removing a majority of the debris, luckily only about a dozen damaged lines were discovered. We inspected approximately 60,000 linear feet over a 6-day period.
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