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Miles upon miles of pipes sprawl under Oriental, out of sight and for the most part, out of mind. Lately though, some of Oriental’s under-the-street scenes are turning up on camera.

What lurks six feet below….

One day in early April, the New Bern-based company, Pipeye was filming the sewer pipe underneath a section of Third Avenue. Bay River Metropolitan Sewer District Superintendent Art Hough says he hired Pipeye to verify whether there was an existing tap to a nearby lot. (That’s sometimes necessary to do, he says because some records of sewer layouts are not reliable.)

The same stretch of Third Avenue between Vandemere and High Streets.

Instead of sending a man to do the job, Pipeye’s owner, David Tennant and a crew lowered a remote-controlled camera 6 feet in to the man-hole and then let it roll about 150 feet. As its 3 pairs of wheels rolled over the bottom of the pipe, the camera sent back video of a scene that most people would want to avoid seeing first hand.

Pipeye co-owner Rhonda Tennant and the scene in the trailer and underneath the street.

A cable connected the camera to a small white trailer parked near the manhole cover. Inside the trailer, a video monitor played out the scenes from the sewer pipe.

A tangle of tree roots in the pipe. It appeared that the roots broke through the pipe.

As the camera proceeded forward, the screen showed a grayish maw of the tunnel and then about 150 feet in, a corner to turn and an apparent obstruction: tree roots that could have grown through the walls of the sewer pipe. Clearing that up would be a job for another day for the sewer district

David Tennant of Pipeye gives a DVD of the camera’s trip thru the sewer pipe to Bay River Metropolitan Sewer District Superintendent Art Hough.

Bay River’s Superintendent Hough says a state mandate requires that 10 % of a sewer district’s lines be cleaned every year as part of a maintenance program.

The camera, at right, rolled on three sets of wheels. One crew member jumped in to the manhole to wrap things up.

While Pipeye doesn’t do the cleaning of the pipes, co-owner David Tennant’s hoping the mandate will translate in to more work for his newly acquired camera and equipment. The cost of doing the underground survey on Third Street would run about in the vicinity of $300. A few weeks earlier they’d done another underground survey closer to the harbor.

The crew of Pipeye. David Tennant, Rhonda Tennant, Greg Henry and Michael Tanner

Posted Tuesday April 14, 2009 by Melinda Penkava