In four years as a Navy Seabee I ran more pipe and dug more trench than most plumbers do in twenty. When I came home to Oregon I went to work for a generalist firm. They sent me to a sewer job on a Tuesday and a faucet swap on a Wednesday. The faucet job paid the same. I quit and started Subterra in 2003. Karl Sundström, Founder
Karl Sundström, 2003
Karl grew up in Astoria, on the Oregon coast — his father ran logging camps in the Coast Range, and Karl learned to swing a maul and run a backhoe before he learned to drive. He enlisted in 1982 and served four years with U.S. Navy Construction Battalion 5 — "Seabees," in the Pacific. The deployments to Diego Garcia and the Persian Gulf were heavy on the SK-12 portable pipeline projects: laying mile after mile of 6-inch through 12-inch pipe through coral, sand, and basalt under deadline conditions. He came home in 1986 with a pipe-fitting trade and an Oregon master plumber's apprenticeship lined up.
From 1987 through 2003 Karl worked for two different Portland generalist plumbing firms — first as a journeyman, then as a senior tech, then as a lead on the larger sewer projects the rotation didn't really have a name for. The firms were good. The work was steady. But sewer was always treated as the secondary thing — the dirty thing, the hard thing, the job everyone hoped someone else would catch. Most days, Karl was the someone else.
By the late 1990s he had run more residential sewer replacements than anyone in the firm and was starting to recognize patterns the generalists didn't speak to: how Portland's clay subsoil moves seasonally and stresses pipe joints; how the city's Douglas fir and Western red cedar root systems exploit any joint imperfection in a 1920s lateral; how Orangeburg pipe (laid widely in Portland between 1948 and 1972) fails predictably at year 50–60. The expertise was specific. The firms he worked for did not value it specifically.
In March 2003 Karl bought a 2002 Ford F-450, lettered it himself, and hung his own shingle. The firm's first job was an Eastmoreland clay-tile lateral — 44 feet, fully excavated, $4,800. The customer was a high-school friend from Astoria who'd been told to call him.
Marina, 2014
Marina Sundström-Reyes graduated from Oregon State in 2012 with a B.S. in Civil Engineering — specialization in underground infrastructure. She spent her senior capstone working on a city of Salem sewer asset-condition study and decided she wanted to do that work, not as a city consultant, but as a contractor — close to the pipe.
Her first job out of school was two years at a Portland geotechnical firm doing sewer condition assessments for the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services. She walked the videos. She tagged the offsets. She came home most weekends and re-read her father's job sheets at the kitchen table. By late 2013 it was clear to both of them that her future was at Subterra.
She joined the firm in May 2014 — first as a project coordinator, then as a fully-credentialed master plumber (OR PJ-CB #29841 issued in 2017). Her assignment from day one was to build out the trenchless capability the firm had been sub-contracting and turning away. She negotiated the equipment package. She wrote the operations manual. She trained Lonnie Cruz and Eli Mendez on the rig before she trained herself on it solo.
Since 2019 Marina has been Operations Lead. She runs every trenchless project personally — every pipe-bursting pull, every CIPP-lining job. She is on every site.
Adding the trenchless rig, 2017
The decision to buy the rig was the most consequential financial decision in the firm's history. The package — a TT Technologies Grundocrack 800G pneumatic pipe-bursting system, a TRIC Tools 6-ton hydraulic pulling unit, and a 2017 Peterbilt 348 chassis to mount them on — totaled $340,000 financed across five years. We made the last payment in 2022.
The justification was simple. The two Oregon-based rental companies that supplied the rig to other Portland plumbers were charging $14,000–$18,000 per project just for the rig plus a contracted operator. Subterra was running 30+ trenchless projects a year as a sub-contracted client. Owning the rig meant capturing that markup, scheduling on our own calendar, and — most importantly — putting Marina on the controls instead of a rotating rental operator who didn't know our customers or our standards.
The first project on the new rig was a Hawthorne lateral — 42 feet, 4" cast iron pulled to 4" HDPE, March 21, 2017. The homeowner was an SE Portland family who had been quoted $19,200 by a generalist firm sub-contracting the rig. We did it for $13,600 and Marina ran the pull herself. The rig paid for itself in 18 months.
What we do not do
Subterra is a single-niche specialty firm. The list of services we do not offer is as important to the brand as the list we do.
- General plumbing — faucets, water heaters, fixture installs, repipes
- Referred to either Mercer Plumbing in Beaverton or Aldine Plumbing in NE Portland — both are family-run generalists we trust.
- Septic systems — tank, drainfield, septic-to-sewer conversions
- Referred to Lewis Septic in Clackamas — a Sandy-based firm that specializes in septic and has the vacuum-pumper fleet we don't.
- Industrial and commercial sewer — process drains, grease interceptors, food-service lines
- Referred to Apex Industrial Plumbing in Portland — they have the after-hours grease-trap rotation and large-diameter capability we don't.
- Anything involving a backflow assembly, a domestic water service, or a gas line
- Referred to one of the two named generalists.
The day we install a faucet for a customer is the day we stop being Subterra. We're a sewer firm. That's the entire promise.
The crew
Twelve people total. Eight sewer/drain technicians on the service-truck rotation. Two trenchless specialists (Marina, plus journeyman Eli Mendez, who has been with the firm since 2012). One dispatcher (handles emergency triage and routes the on-call truck). One admin (handles permits, invoicing, and BDS coordination).
The two senior names a customer will see most often are Lonnie Cruz — Subterra crew chief since 2007, alternates the after-hours emergency rotation with Marina — and Eli Mendez, who has been on the trenchless side since 2017 and runs the second emergency truck.