Orangeburg or Clay: What Your Sewer Pipe Is Made Of

Possibly, and no record anywhere will tell you. Bituminous fiber pipe sold as Orangeburg went into house connections from roughly the early 1950s to the early 1970s, and no municipal record identifies which houses have it, so a camera down the line is the only thing that answers the question.

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Two eras of pipe under one county

Housing age is the first filter and this county splits cleanly on it. The median year of construction is 1938 in East Syracuse village, Liverpool village and Skaneateles village, 1947 in Solvay village and 1948 in the City of Syracuse. It is 1956 in Galeville and Westvale, 1958 in Camillus village, 1959 in North Syracuse village, and 1961 in Fairmount and Fayetteville village. Then 1975 in Baldwinsville village, 1977 in Village Green and 1990 in Radisson. Those three groups are three different conversations about what is in the ground. The pre-war and immediately post-war housing is the clay era. The 1950s and 1960s suburbs are the era in which bituminous fiber pipe, sold under the brand name Orangeburg, was going into new house connections as standard.

The federal standard behind Orangeburg never asked how long it would last

This is the detail that explains everything else about the material. The standard behind it is Commercial Standard CS116-44, promulgated by the National Bureau of Standards and effective for new production from March 10, 1944. It covers the pipe in diameters of 2 to 8 inches in 5 and 8 foot lengths, and its first listed use is house connections to sewers and septic tanks. Its durability tests are a 48 hour water immersion allowing a 2 percent weight gain, a 30 day chemical immersion, a boiling water test, and a resistance to flattening test allowing a 3 percent decrease in diameter under load and heat. The longest of those runs thirty days, and the standard contains no service life requirement of any kind. A product qualified against a month of immersion went into the ground under front yards that are now seventy years old.

Which parts of this metro are the Orangeburg era

The census gives it street by street. The share of housing built between 1940 and 1969, the years bituminized fiber sewer pipe was in production under the federal standard, runs 72.3 percent in Fairmount, 71.8 in Seneca Knolls, 71.2 in Westvale, 70.6 in Galeville, 65.4 in Mattydale, 59.1 in Nedrow, 56.1 in Lyncourt and 55.3 in North Syracuse village. By town, Camillus is the highest in the county at 53.4 percent, then Geddes at 51.6 and Salina at 47.7, against a county figure of 34.8. Those are the addresses where a slow drain is worth investigating rather than living with. It is also why a Fairmount house and a Skaneateles house with the same symptom are not the same investigation at all.

How you tell, and the method that can make it worse

The City of Ann Arbor's building department, which deals with the same generation of private lines, describes Orangeburg as the brand name of a bituminous fiber pipe made from plant-based fibers and asbestos soaked in a tar-like substance, manufactured to ASTM D-1861 for the homogeneous pipe and ASTM D-1862 for the laminated wall version, and states that bituminous fiber piping systems have experienced numerous failures over the years with many needing complete replacement. It puts the usage window at roughly the early 1950s to the early 1970s, with reports of it in homes as early as 1949, and says plainly that no municipal record identifies which houses have it. It lists a video scan of the line as the way to identify it, and warns that inserting a rooter, snake or mechanical cutter may yield clues but may also further damage the pipe. Read that last sentence again before booking a clearance on a 1950s house.

Clay is a different problem with a different answer

Vitrified clay is not a defective material and it never stopped being legal. Table P3002.2 of the New York residential code still lists vitrified clay pipe to ASTM C425 and ASTM C700 among the materials permitted for a building sewer today, alongside concrete, cast iron, ABS, PVC, polyethylene, copper and stainless steel, while bituminized fiber pipe appears nowhere on that list. What clay does is open at the joints, which is an entry point rather than a collapse, and that is why the oldest housing here is a root story rather than a deformation story. In this county 62.1 percent of East Syracuse village housing predates 1950, along with 61.2 percent in Skaneateles village, 60.4 percent in Liverpool village, 53.6 percent in Solvay village and 51.4 percent in the City of Syracuse. A camera tells the two apart in minutes, and the repair is not the same repair.

Asbestos changes who is allowed to touch the pipe

Bituminous fiber pipe contains asbestos, and so does the asbestos-cement pipe that was legitimately specified around here: Village of Fayetteville Code section 133-13 permits Transite or equal asbestos-cement building sewer pipe where the Superintendent approves it. New York Industrial Code Rule 56 defines an asbestos project as work involving the removal, encapsulation, enclosure, repair or disturbance of friable or non-friable asbestos, sizes a minor project at 25 linear feet or less and a small project at more than 25 and less than 260 linear feet, and at section 56-3.1 forbids any contractor from engaging in an asbestos project without a valid asbestos handling license from the Commissioner. Section 56-1.4 requires the asbestos contractor to tell every other contractor on site that disturbance by anyone else is prohibited, and section 56-1.3 exempts only owner-occupied single family dwellings where the owner performs the work. Raise it before the quote, not after the dig.

Replacing it without opening the whole yard

Section P3010 of the New York residential code allows a building sewer or building drain to be replaced by pipe bursting, and section 3011 allows PVC fold and form. Pipe bursting is limited to gravity drainage piping of 6 inches and smaller, the replacement has to be the same nominal size, and the new pipe must be high density polyethylene to ASTM F714. The code also requires an internal recorded video camera survey both before and after the work, with the after survey reviewed and approved by the building official before pressure testing, and requires cleanout fittings to be installed where the existing sewer did not have them. For a 1950s lateral running under a mature lawn and a driveway, whether the line qualifies for that method is the question that decides what your front yard looks like a month from now.

When the honest answer is that nothing needs doing

Age on its own is not a defect and it is not a reason to replace anything. If the camera shows a round bore, sound joints and a clear run, what you have bought is certainty and a recording, and the correct next step is to keep grease and wipes out of it and look again in a few years. Some of this metro is barely in the conversation: the Town of Clay has 26,282 housing units, the largest stock in the county outside the city, with a median year built of 1978 and only 5.6 percent of it built before 1950, the lowest share in this metro. If your address is in Clay, Radisson or Village Green, deformation of a seventy year old fiber pipe is very unlikely to be your problem, and a slow drain there is a slow drain rather than an omen.

What to ask for, and what we will do with it

Ask for the survey before the diagnosis, and ask to keep the recording, because it is the document every later decision refers back to. Ask what the pipe appears to be made of, and at what distance from the house its condition changes, since that distance is what tells you whether you are looking at a repair to one section or a replacement of the run. Ask whether the line qualifies for a trenchless method. Then tell us what the footage showed, along with your municipality and roughly when the house was built, and we will put you in front of licensed, insured contractors who work that area and quote against what is actually in the ground rather than against what a house of that age usually has.