The two wooden water pipes pictured here are on display at a Museum in Corowa, Australia, apparently used for the town water supply in the late 1800's. They are made with two or more pieces of wood and are bound together with wire.

Also see PDF wth more detailed information.

Source: Geoff Goodfellow, Customer Service and Media Manager, Wingecarribee Shire Council. Thanks also to former Environment and Planning staff member Yvette Cotter, now with the Department of Commerce, for passing on this information.

A Wingecarribee Shire Council road crew unearthed wooden water pipes in 2006 when doing some excavations along Suttor Road in Moss Vale, Australia. They were able to carefully dig out a length that included two intact collars about eighteen feet apart in an almost perfectly preserved section.

We know that when the original Moss Vale water supply began pumping water up to town from the Bong Bong reservoir in 1894, there were around six miles of reticulation pipes of 6, 4 and 3 inch diameter laid around the main streets of Moss Vale. These were cast iron pipes, so the use of wooden pipes remains a bit of a mystery.

This old section of pipe is wrapped in a wire that hasn’t rusted and seems to have been treated with some sort of bitumen. The lads have dug up wooden pipes before, particularly in Bowral around Merrigang Street and also in other parts of Moss Vale.

Also see PDF with more detailed explanation of the excavation.

Source: Geoff Goodfellow, Customer Service and Media Manager, Wingecarribee Shire Council.

A look inside a manhole located on a hill that is on the move, New Zealand.

The hill is in the process of slowly sliding along a "greasyback" (New Zealand term for permeable soils setting on top of a slanted clay layer). Water builds up on top of the slanted clay layer and acts as a lubricant of sorts between the layers. The top layer ends up sliding off the clay layer. This one has been slowly on the move for at least 3 years (in 2007). Houses, water lines, sewer lines, roads - all are on the slide. There are a couple of fault lines running thorugh the town as well just to shake things up a little bit every now and then. It's a town engineer's nightmare... and a consultant's dream.

The center of the bottom of the manhole (look for the washing machine foam at the bottom, also a black PE pipe is there) is about 8 inches off the center of the top. There are two places along the vertical profile of the manhole where the risers have displaced from the riser beneath, about 4 inches per displacement.

Source: Catherine Schladweiler, from a source in New Zealand.