How a 110-Year-Old Power Plant Rehabilitated Its Pipes in 9 Days — Without Breaking a Slab

When a generating station has been running since 1914, its piping doesn’t fail all at once. It deteriorates slowly, in the places that are hardest to reach — under concrete slabs, behind machinery, deep below grade. By the time the problem is obvious, the options are limited and the clock is ticking.

That was the situation at the JR Kelly Generating Station in Gainesville, Florida, one of the longest continuously operating power plants in the state. After more than a century of service, portions of the plant’s carbon steel piping system had reached an advanced stage of deterioration. The pipes ran in every direction — vertical drops, horizontal runs, multiple bends, and directional transitions — and most of them were buried beneath a reinforced concrete slab.

Why Replacement Wasn’t an Option

The pipes couldn’t be ripped out and replaced. Breaking through reinforced concrete slabs at an active generating station would have meant weeks of demolition, reconstruction, and system downtime. The Gainesville Regional Utilities Authority couldn’t afford that — the plant provides power to the city, and extended shutdowns directly affect the community.

Adding another layer of difficulty: the scope included a 50-foot vertical steel stack that also needed rehabilitation. And every bit of the work had to be completed within a scheduled 12-day outage. Not a rough target — a hard deadline. The plant had to be back online.

This is a scenario that plant managers and utility engineers know well. The infrastructure is aging, the access is terrible, and the maintenance window is short. Traditional pipe replacement simply doesn’t fit the constraints.

A Trenchless Approach Designed Around the Constraints

Gulf Coast Underground, the project’s engineering firm, brought in Spray In Place Solutions to develop a rehabilitation strategy that could work within the plant’s physical and scheduling constraints.

The approach used spray-in-place pipe (SIPP) technology — a trenchless method that cleans and coats the inside of existing pipes with a structural epoxy, without removing them from their installed location. There’s no need to break through slabs, tear out walls, or relocate machinery. The pipe stays where it is. A robotic spray head, guided by computer-controlled software, applies the epoxy coating from within.

But this wasn’t a straightforward application. The piping system had varying diameters, vertical drops, and numerous directional changes. In some sections, the pipes were only 24 inches in diameter — tight enough that crew members had to be physically lowered into the pipe to clean and prepare the surfaces and to guide the spin-casting equipment into position.

Spray In Place Solutions developed a detailed 10-day execution plan and mobilized a large, specialized crew. The team worked consecutive 12-hour shifts, including two full weekends, applying Warren Environmental’s 100% solids epoxy coatings to both horizontal and vertical runs and through multiple bends. Warren’s epoxy is one of only two sprayable polymers in the world that has achieved a 75-year engineered life, and it contains zero VOCs and zero PFAS.

Completed in 9 Days

The project was completed in nine days — three days ahead of the 12-day outage window. The GRU Authority got its plant back online early, with rehabilitated piping that now has a 75-year engineered life expectancy. No slabs were broken. No machinery was moved. No power generation was interrupted beyond the scheduled outage.

What This Means for Aging Utility Infrastructure

Power plants, water treatment facilities, and industrial campuses across the country share the same challenge: critical piping systems that are decades past their intended service life, installed in locations that make replacement impractical or prohibitively expensive. When the only maintenance windows are measured in days rather than months, traditional approaches fall short.

Trenchless SIPP rehabilitation changes the math. It works within the footprint of the existing system, accommodates complex geometries and tight access, and delivers structural results that extend service life by decades. For facilities where downtime is measured in lost revenue or community impact, that flexibility isn’t a convenience — it’s a requirement.

Project Summary

Facility

JR Kelly Generating Station

Location

Gainesville, Florida

Client

Gainesville Regional Utilities Authority

Engineer

Gulf Coast Underground

Pipe System

Carbon steel, varying diameters, vertical and horizontal runs

Challenge

Advanced deterioration, buried under reinforced concrete, 12-day outage window

Solution

Trenchless SIPP epoxy rehabilitation using Warren Environmental coatings

Timeline

Completed in 9 days (3 days ahead of schedule)

Year

2025

Facing a similar challenge at your facility? Contact Spray In Place Solutions to discuss your rehabilitation needs. We work with plant managers and engineers nationwide to develop solutions for aging infrastructure with limited access and tight schedules.