The Levee Pipes Nobody Would Fix — How Massillon, Ohio Solved a Two-Year Problem

For two years, the City of Massillon, Ohio tried to find someone who could fix the outlet pipes in its levee system. For two years, nobody said yes.

The levee, built in 1951 along the Tuscarawas River, protects roughly 630 acres of the city — including much of downtown — from flooding. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers oversees the levee itself, while the city owns the pumping stations that push floodwaters back into the river. The system includes 24-inch and 30-inch circular steel outlet pipes, each with 45-degree bends, that terminate underwater on the river side with access available from only one end.

Inspections had revealed separated joints, internal corrosion, and failed sections of an older tar-based liner. To comply with the Clean Water Act and prevent pollutants from entering the city’s storm sewer system, repairs were essential. But the pipe geometry — 45-degree bends, single-end access, underwater terminations — made this a job that conventional rehabilitation methods couldn’t handle.

Why CIPP Companies Turned It Down

Cured-in-place pipe (CIPP) lining is one of the most widely used trenchless rehabilitation methods, and the city’s engineering firm, OHM Advisors, initially pursued that route. But CIPP has inherent limitations. The liner is pulled or inverted through the pipe as a continuous tube, then cured in place — which means it needs to travel through every bend and transition in a single pass. In pipes with 45-degree bends, that’s difficult. In pipes with single-end access and underwater terminations, it becomes impractical.

Company after company evaluated the job and declined. The geometry was too complex. The access was too limited. The risk was too high. By the fall of 2025, the city had been searching for a willing contractor for two years.

This is a scenario that municipal engineers encounter more often than most people realize. Not every pipe runs in a straight line with convenient access at both ends. When the geometry gets complex, the list of viable rehabilitation options gets very short.

A Different Technology for a Different Kind of Problem

OHM Advisors found Spray In Place Solutions through Warren Environmental, the epoxy manufacturer. After discussions about SIPP rehabilitation — how it works, what geometries it can handle, and the team’s track record as the leading applicator of Warren’s coatings — the decision was made to move forward.

Unlike CIPP, spray-in-place pipe (SIPP) technology doesn’t require pulling a liner through the entire pipe in one shot. A robotic spray head applies epoxy coating directly to the pipe wall from within, following the pipe’s geometry — bends, transitions, and all. Single-end access is workable because the equipment enters and exits from the same point. The epoxy bonds directly to the host pipe, forming a monolithic structural coating.

Spray In Place Solutions was paired with Nerone and Sons – Specialized Contracting as the general contractor. Nerone handled access, pipe cuts, traffic control, and reinstatement while the SIPP crew focused on cleaning and coating.

The Surprise Inside the Pipe

When the crew mobilized and inspected the site conditions, they found an unexpected problem. The old deteriorated liner inside the pipes wasn’t just any coating — it was tar.

This mattered because Warren Environmental’s epoxy cures through an exothermic chemical reaction that generates temperatures up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. At those temperatures, tar melts. If the epoxy were spin-cast over the tar in the standard way, the heat of the curing process would liquefy the tar beneath it, preventing the epoxy from properly bonding to the pipe wall. The coating would fail.

This wasn’t a theoretical concern. Spray In Place Solutions had encountered tar coatings on previous projects and knew from direct experience that spraying epoxy over tar doesn’t work. The original rehabilitation plan needed to change — with the crew already on site.

Adapting the Approach on Site

The team went back to the drawing board and developed a revised plan. First, they cleaned away all of the old, damaged tar, leaving undisturbed only the sections of tar that were still intact and well-adhered. Then, instead of using the robotic spin-casting equipment to apply the epoxy, the exposed pipe sections and separated joints were rehabilitated by hand-troweling Warren Environmental’s epoxy directly onto the surfaces that needed repair.

This hybrid approach — selective removal of failed coating, preservation of intact areas, and targeted hand application of structural epoxy — wasn’t in the original scope. It was developed in the field, based on the crew’s years of experience working with these materials in unpredictable conditions. The depth of that experience is what made the pivot possible. A less experienced team, encountering the tar for the first time, would have been stuck.

All of the work was accomplished from the top of the levee with minimal traffic disruption, at a fraction of the cost of pipe replacement — which had never been seriously considered due to the prohibitive expense and the impossibility of excavating through a levee structure overseen by the Army Corps of Engineers.

When the Standard Approach Doesn’t Fit

The Massillon project illustrates something important about pipe rehabilitation: the hardest problems aren’t always the biggest pipes or the longest runs. They’re the ones with constraints that don’t fit neatly into a standard method. A 45-degree bend. Single-end access. An old tar coating that nobody knew about until the pipe was open. A levee you can’t excavate through.

These are the projects that get deferred for years — not because the municipality doesn’t care, but because the conventional solutions don’t work and nobody has offered an alternative. Massillon spent two years looking. When they finally found a team with the right technology and enough field experience to adapt when things went sideways, the problem got solved.

If your municipality is sitting on a pipe rehabilitation project that contractors have turned down, it’s worth exploring whether SIPP technology can handle what CIPP can’t.

Project Summary

Facility

Tuscarawas River levee system and pumping stations

Location

Massillon, Ohio

Client

City of Massillon

General Contractor

Nerone and Sons – Specialized Contracting

Pipe System

24" and 30" circular steel low-pressure outlet pipes with 45-degree bends

Challenge

Complex geometry, single-end access, underwater terminations, failed tar coating incompatible with standard epoxy application, 2 years without a willing contractor

Solution

Selective tar removal and hand-troweled Warren Environmental epoxy on exposed sections and joints

Year

2025

Have a pipe rehabilitation project that other contractors have turned down? Contact Spray In Place Solutions to discuss whether SIPP technology can solve it. We’ve worked in 27 states on projects that others couldn’t — or wouldn’t — take on.