Ameron pipe at work in San Francisco Bay cleanup

   Ameron pipe products have been providing essential services for the San Francisco Bay area for more than half a century. They have moved water, collected and transported sewage, and carried off storm drainage since Ernest Bent built the first company pipe plant in Oakland in 1928.

   Today, situated on 73 acres along the Nimitz Freeway in Hayward, the Ameron Pipe Division-Northern California continues as a principal concrete pressure pipe supplier to the north part of the state and adjacent regions.

   In the company's long association with Bay Area utilities, however, no group of related projects has been more essential to the health and prosperity of the area than a group of concrete pipe intensive programs presently under way to eliminate the release of untreated or inadequately treated sewage into San Francisco Bay.

  Programs of this kind have been in existence since 1947, but principally they have been the concern of major metropolitan areas.  Now, adjacent communities whose growth rates have exploded in recent years are catching up with a network of new or expanded sewage treatment plants, additional pumping stations and concrete pipelines that extend from one end of the bay to the other.

     Largest of these projects is one planned and managed by the East Bay Dischargers Authority.  This agency, funded by federal, state and local dollars, is responsible for a system to collect, treat and safely dispose of wastes from the City of San Leandro, the Union (City) Sanitary District, the Ora Lorna Sanitary District and the City of Hayward. Besides four new treatment plants and supporting pumping stations, 236,000 linear feet of concrete pipe, ranging in diameters from 33 to 96 in., is required.  Of this 44 miles of pipelines, Ameron is supplying 38 miles.  The area serves a population of 450,000.

    Above Richmond, where adjoining waters become San Pablo Bay, the communities of Rodeo and Pinole have combined to upgrade their sewage sys- tems. For this more modest program.  Ameron produced and delivered 4,000 linear ft. of 30 in. diameter lined and coated steel pipe which forms an outfall sewer line.  Unlike the much larger Richmond outfall where concrete pipe sections are being installed in a submarine trench two at a time, the Rodeo subaqueous pipe were welded together on shore and winched out into the bay as a continuous pipeline.

   Upriver at Sacramento, Ameron also has completed delivery of about 10 miles of concrete pressure pipe for the Central and Northeast Interceptor Sewer Systems, a part of the Sacramento Regional County Sanitation District's expansion and improvement program.  Included in these pipe requirements were two river crossings and some special subaqueous pipe, 10 ft. in diameter, designed to serve as diffusers for the release of filtered and treated, clean effluents into the Sacramento River.

   Related projects for the delta area are in progress or will be open for bid in the near future.  All will help improve the quality of water pouring into San Francisco Bay within the next few years.  Combined with East Bay prgrams, they will restore this famous waterway to a healthy environment for fish, shellfish, waterfowl, fishermen and others who pursue water-related sports.

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