Method questions

The short answer

When a contractor names cured-in-place lining, pipe bursting, open-cut excavation, or a spot repair, they have already ruled several things out. These questions surface what the choice rests on — not to challenge it, but to make it legible.

Every method depends on something being true about the pipe: its material, its shape, whether it still holds its position, and how it is reached. Ask how each of those was established, at what point in the work a wrong assumption would surface, and what happens then.

A partial liner and lining the whole run are different answers to different findings, and so are repairing a length and replacing the line. Where an option has been ruled out, the useful question is what would have had to be different about this property for it to stay on the table.

The choice itself

• Why this method for this line?
• What did you consider and rule out, and why?
• What about my line makes the alternatives less suitable?
• What would have to be true for a different method to be better here?

What it depends on

• What has to be true about the pipe for this method to work?
• How was each of those things established?
• What happens if one of them turns out to be different?
• At what point in the work would you find that out?

Consequences

• What does this method disturb that another would not?
• What does it leave in place that another would remove?
• What does it make harder to do later?
• How would the result be verified?