Orangeburg Pipe: How to Spot It Before the Sewer Collapses

What is Orangeburg pipe, and why is it in so many houses?

Orangeburg pipe is sewer pipe made out of wood pulp and tar. Layers of fiber get pressed together and soaked in coal tar pitch. The water utility in Edmonton describes the material as bituminized fiber pipe and says it is essentially tar paper. The name comes from Orangeburg, New York, where the stuff was made.

Builders took to it after the war for simple reasons. Metal was tight and expensive, the pipe weighed almost nothing, and a man could cut it with a handsaw and push the joints together in the trench. It was a legitimate, code approved material for about twenty years. Ann Arbor's building department keeps the clearest paper trail on that: the state plumbing board accepted the material on November 1, 1949, the city allowed it from 1949 to 1970, and an ordinance effective in May 1970 took it off the approved list. Two ASTM specifications covered it, D-1861 for solid wall pipe and D-1862 for the laminated kind. That same page notes the fiber was mixed with asbestos on some runs, worth knowing before anyone breaks old pipe up by hand. The city's write up on the material is here.

How do I know if my house has Orangeburg pipe?

Age gets you to a maybe. If the house went up between 1945 and 1972 and nobody has touched the sewer lateral since, it is a candidate. That is a wide net in this county. Santa Rosa's housing element counted nearly 21,000 units, 31 percent of the city's housing stock, as built in 1969 or earlier, and the postwar tracts in Santa Rosa and San Rafael sit inside the window. The city reports that count in its housing element.

No agency hands you an answer. Ann Arbor says plainly that it keeps no complete list of which houses have it. So you are down to three ways of finding out. A camera run down the line is the usual one. A snake sometimes answers it by accident, when the cable comes back with chunks of black fiber on it, though by then you have probably done the pipe no favors. Digging is the last resort. One thing to keep in mind: the fiber pipe normally started about five feet past the foundation and ran out to the main, so cast iron under the house tells you nothing about what is out in the yard.

What does Orangeburg pipe look like on a sewer camera?

It does not fail the way clay does. Clay cracks and shears at a joint. This material softens and loses its shape instead, so the camera is reading geometry more than cracks. What the operator is looking for:

• An oval bore. The weight of the soil squeezes the crown down over time. EPCOR describes the pipe starting to go oval as it softens under the pressure of the ground above it.
• A hump rising off the floor of the pipe. Laminated pipe can bow up from the bottom, which turns the bore into a slot.
• Blistering and peeling. The layers separate and curl into the flow.
• Root hair at the joints. The joints were shaped to fit together, with no gasket, so they open up early.
• Black fiber debris sitting in the low spots.

The trap is a line that still reads round. Ann Arbor's guidance makes the point that the inside of the pipe can be well gone while the outside still holds a circular shape. A quick pass that only checks for a blockage can miss a wall that has nothing left in it.

How long does Orangeburg pipe last?

EPCOR puts the average life at about 50 years under ideal conditions, and says so on its homeowner page. Run the arithmetic. The last of this pipe went in the ground around 1972, and 1972 plus 50 is 2022, so every length of it is now past its rating, and most of it was buried well before the cutoff.

Three things take years off it. The material absorbs water, from the sewage going through it and from the dirt packed around it, so a wet winter is not kind to it. Roots work the joints. And solvents eat the binder, which is why Ann Arbor warns against putting paint thinner, mineral spirits or adhesive cleaners down a drain on a house of that age. Once it starts to go out of shape, it tends to keep going fairly quickly.

What does it cost to deal with?

Our camera inspection runs $150 to $500, and sits at the low end when the house already has a cleanout. A spot repair, meaning one excavation on one bad section, runs $1,500 to $4,500. A full lateral of 40 to 80 feet runs $7,000 to $15,000, and a deep line or one that has to be opened under the street can reach $25,000. Adding a cleanout runs $600 to $2,000.

On fiber pipe, a spot repair is usually money poorly spent. Every foot of that lateral is the same age and the same material, so fixing the worst 6 feet leaves you with 50 more of it. Full per foot pricing and permit figures are in our sewer line replacement cost guide.

Can it be lined, or does it have to come out?

Shape decides, and EPCOR states the test about as cleanly as anyone: if the pipe has held its round shape, lining it with a resin impregnated material may be a workable repair, and once it has gone oval, replacing the whole run from the foundation to the property line may be the only thing left. So the camera is what tells you which of those two jobs you are buying. How both methods work, and the defects that rule them out, is in our post on trenchless sewer repair.

If you are selling in Marin, the decision may not be yours to postpone, because several districts there require a passing lateral inspection at the point of sale. The district rules and the paperwork are in our guide to Marin sewer lateral inspections.

Houses this old are worth a camera run before the rains, not after a backup on a Sunday. We have been pulling this pipe out of Sonoma and Marin yards since 2017, and you get the video and a written price in hand before anyone brings a shovel. Call (707) 308-5599 to get the line looked at, or read what we do on sewer line repair.