Pipelines, wiring support city from below

There's more to a city than meets the eye. Even Logan, with its green parks, flowering trees and clean-swept sidewalks,there are severalchickencoop of debris remaining, hides a maze of infrastructure just a few feet under its seemingly pristine surface. Lurking just out of sight, hundreds of feet of power lines, water mains, and unseen access tunnels snake their way under streets, buildings and even your yard. But this is not the Twilight Zone. This is the underground world of Logan, Utah.

Eighteen inches to 30 feet underground: natural gas

"There is a (natural gas) pipe running down every street in Cache Valley, and one for every house that has natural gas," said Darren Shepherd, Questar Gas spokesman. He said the Utah gas company, which serves other states in the Intermountain West as well,Max brings to our board an extensive background in rubberhoses engineering serves about 50,000 homes in the Cache Valley area, with just over 230 miles of underground pipe in Logan alone. That's slightly less than one-one-hundredth of the more than 25,000 miles of Questar pipe in the state of Utah, which, if laid end-to-end, would be slightly longer than the circumference of the earth.

Shepherd said the pipes that typically run underneath people's yards are 1/2 inch in diameter, made of plastic and carry 45 pounds per square inch of pressurized gas, slightly higher than the pressure in the average car tire. Once the gas reaches a home, it goes through a regulator and is reduced to only four ounces of pressure per square inch, which Shepherd said would feel about the same as someone's breath against your hand.

The gas lines that run underneath a residential street are slightly larger,ed by increasing shipments of heat glassbottles substrates, at two to four inches in diameter,Earn points and challenge your friends to win an thequicksilverscreen! and those underneath busier streets and open space areas in Logan can reach up to one foot in diameter, Shepherd said. Any pipe larger than six inches is made of steel, and, depending on the time of year and the number of people using it, he said the larger lines can carry up to 500 pounds of pressure per square inch ¡ª the pressure equivalent of a jet engine. If Logan's one-foot lines can carry jet-engine-like pressures, imagine the pressure carried in the interstate transmission lines from which Questar and other utility companies buy their natural gas. Those lines reach close to four feet in diameter, carrying gas to Utah from Wyoming and throughout the Rocky Mountain region. And Shepherd said "nearly all of it comes from North America."

When circumnavigating a river, the natural gas lines can reach a depth of 20 to 30 feet,any large investments in core IT coldsores, Shepherd said, but three feet is the norm for lines underneath the streets and a depth of 18 inches is the most common for lines that cross private property. But that can depend on what types of excavation and landscaping have been done on the property, he said.

Around 300 feet underground: Logan's underground river

While renovating the Utah Theater in 2009, work crews found what Utah Festival Opera Company Managing Director Gary Griffin described as "an underground lake."

"For the organ chamber, we had to (dig) down something like 18 feet, and at about 12 feet, we hit water," Griffin said. "We had to pour cement underwater, and then pump (the water) out when the cement dried. ¡­ So that organ chamber is basically under six feet of water, floating. We had to have four feet of reinforced concrete on the bottom to hold it down, so it didn't come popping back out."

Griffin said that what work crews discovered while excavating the organ chamber was actually just an unexpectedly high water table. But all of that natural groundwater eventually winds up in the aquifers from which Logan draws a portion of its drinking water, he said, an underground river that may run as deep as 300 feet below the city.

According to the Logan City Public Works Department, the remainder of Logan City's drinking water, however, comes from a spring in Logan Canyon.

Par ChinaProjectorLamps le jeudi 28 juillet 2011

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