It’s not a sewer selfie.

But it might be the next best thing.

The city of Port Townsend will send a remote camera through a downtown sewer pipe in hopes to prevent a future calamitous break in a sewer main, like the one that happened in late December near the ferry terminal.

Public Works Director Steve King said a work crew will be used to probe the sewer pipe near the 14-inch main that collapsed during a king tide Dec. 27.

King briefed the city council on the effort at its meeting last week, where the council unanimously approved a resolution to authorize further repairs to the sewer line near the waterfront.

PEERING THROUGH THE DEPTHS

Workers will use a remote camera to probe and inspect the rest of the sewer line, which feeds into the ferry terminal on Water Street.

“We are going to recommend spending some money to camera the rest of the AC [asbestos-cement] pipe,” King told the council. “If it’s not collapsing, we’ll probably recommend getting a liner in it and slip-line it.”

Part of the caution stems for fears that part of the pipe that leads to the ferry terminal could be collapsed or partially collapsed, which would likely warrant a multi-day project that would involve closing portions on Port Townsend’s main roadway in and out of town.

City officials expect the camera probe to be completed in the next week or so.

“I cant imagine doing this project up Water Street in front of the ferry terminal. That would not be fun,” King said.

The pipe that broke was near Water and Gaines streets and was installed more than a half century ago.

“Unfortunately it makes me wonder about when the rest of the AC pipe from 1966 looks like from there all the way to the ferry terminal,” King told the council.

When asked by Councilmember Aislinn Diamanti on timelines for the camera probe, King said: “Depending on what we see with the camera, we’ll determine how quickly we respond. That will be something we’d try to do in a year.”

LATE CHRISTMAS PRESENT

The sewer main break sent sewage spilling from maintenance holes near the Water and Gaines streets intersection. City crews investigated the sewage overflow, eventually discovering a collapsed 120-foot section of sewer main.

“We discovered there were two breaks in the pipe, and the pipe effectively collapsed,” King said.

Outflows from the collapsed pipe prompted sinkholes in the pavement, and one partially swallowed one of the two city vacuum trucks at the scene.

“We started seeing pieces of pipe, rocks, asphalt, all kinds of good stuff, and we started to realize somewhere we have a hole opening up under the road,” King said. “One of our vactor trucks, luckily our old one, found the hole and fell in.”

The vacuum truck was pulled from the sinkhole and is currently being repaired.

As for the cause of the collapse, King said officials have theories about the origin.

“There’s a number of factors that played into this break. This is all somewhat theoretical, somewhat evidence based, but we have a lot of hydrogen sulfide gas, which partly caused the erosion of the Gaines Street pump station and the concrete was falling apart,” King said.

Hydrogen sulfide gas, also known as sewer gas, is a colorless gas known for its pungent, “rotten egg” odor.

“We believe that, because the top half of the pipe was gone and rotten and the lower half of the pipe was solid and fine, is the hydrogen gas ate the concrete out of the asbestos concrete pipe leaving just asbestos, which turned to goo. Basically like wet cardboard,” King said.

Other factors city staff are considering were the high tides occurring at the end of December, along with the potentially shoddy placement of the pipe in the 1960s.

“The pipe just kind of melted. I don’t know how long it’s been in that condition, but my guess is the high tide, the king tides, combined with that leaking storm drain pipe put some extra stress there,” King said.

“It looks like the pipe was laid on beach gravel, and beach gravel is very permeable, so the tide water was just flowing into the bottom of the trench and it was a nightmare,” he added.

The sewer repairs were particularly grueling to fix, with city crews and workers with Seton Construction spending multiple days replacing and reconnecting the pipe.

“You just can’t shut the sewer off; it’s not like water where we get to close the valve and stabilize the problem,” King said. “We were out of luck. There were no quick repairs here.”

Both crews worked 26-plus hours straight in inclement weather to set up a temporary 18-inch pipe, according to King.

ASBESTOS CONCERNS

Councilmember Owen Rowe inquired about potential hazards left by the asbestos lining the pipes, saying, “When that crumbles like it did, is there any danger of that getting into the wastewater stream and doing bad, asbestos things to us?”

“No, the primary harm in asbestos is airborne, and this pipe was soggy, and we vactored everything out of this system,” King responded.

Councilmember Libby Wennstrom asked about the potential for future sink holes formed from the sewer collapse.

“What’s left has been crushed. It’s done collapsing,” King said of sink hole concerns.

Wennstrom said the timing of the break was perfect, so to speak.

“Having this happen during the snow when we just had a high-tide event, when we also had a landslide, it was kind of a perfect storm of caca,” she said.