Pipe company adds vac operation

FAMILIAR faces in the Ballarat business community, Dannielle and Jason James have taken on a new civil construction challenge, expanding their operations beyond directional drilling.

In their 10 years of running Pipe Pro Drilling, they sometimes ran vacuum excavation trucks beside their drills on work sites.

“Over the last four years, we’ve kept getting requests from people to hire them off us, so in 2020, Jason started looking into building and engineering our own truck from scratch,” Ms James said.

“We researched the market, and started running James Vac Solutions last year.”

Ms James said demand for these services, particularly in Ballarat’s growth corridors including Delacombe and Sebastopol, is “through the roof.”

Every day of operation has been so busy that they’ve purchased two additional vacuum excavation trucks and a street-sweeper to work harmoniously, and they now have five employees.

“The vacuum excavation trucks have a big, long spout, similar to your vacuum at home, which can be put into holes to suck out mud, water and waste on worksites, so people can then excavate,” she said.

“Their second function is high-pressure water jet excavation. If workers need to dig up the side of a road to see where a gas line is, high pressure water can flush mud, rock and dirt out, to expose pipelines safely without breaking them.

“If anything’s surrounding them, the big vacuum hose can suck it out. It’s also more environmentally friendly, and time efficient.”

For people living in growing estates near worksites, she said the service lessens the need for big excavators to dig up nature strips near homes, and any mess made is taken away at the end of the day.

“Our street sweeper cleans the road after the work is done, and independently to our jobs, other civil construction companies across Ballarat are hiring it out for the day to clean up their sites,” she said.