LAFAYETTE, La. — Starting on Tuesday, lane closures on Pinhook Road will begin to repair damaged drainage pipes underneath the street.
Construction workers there tell KATC that they will use an epoxy lining to coat the pipe, making it structurally sound. Rather than dig up the road and fix it from the outside, they are fixing it from the inside. Once this construction has finished, roadwork will begin to cover the many potholes caused by the poor conditions of the pipes below.
"You can see the top side the state of the road as it is, and pipe is under the road," said Todd Webber, Project Manager at Gulf Coast Underground. "So, if the pipe is not in great structure, you know that the ground above it is going into the pipe."
Usually, projects like these would take months to finish. With newly released technology, a camera robot made by Edge Ai, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is helping municipalities like Lafayette to inspect pipes even faster while leasing this technology, making it cost-effective.
One of the robot's founders, Allan Dubeau, calls this machine a "crawler." It can go on for miles and was 18 inches below Pinhook Road. Dubeau was controlling the advanced technology and overseeing what the camera saw underground.
"It's very important to be able to see what's going underneath us, so the technology is basically is you wanna be able to get that camera system in pipes to assess," said Dubeau. "To know what types of repairs that need to be done in order to have a healthy environment or infrastructure."
Construction on Pinhook will cause lane changes northbound and southbound, with lane closures lasting until March 21.
