A popular piping fix is making people sick

Rob Shoaff likened the smell to plastic model cement. It originated in the basement but soon spread to multiple floors of his three-story house in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It irritated his nose and gave him headaches that lingered even after the smell was gone.

The cause? Cured-in-place pipe lining, an increasingly popular pipeline rehabilitation procedure that has been used on hundreds of millions of feet of underground infrastructure — a figure expected to grow as the nation races to rehab its aging water and sewer lines. The cost-effective solution has increasingly been linked to human consequences, causing sickness for residents like Shoaff.