Electro Scan begins third major Hillsborough County, Florida sewer inspection
Electro Scan Inc. announced today that it began work on its third major sewer inspection project for Hillsborough County, Florida.
The county first adopted the company’s leak detection service in 2019 to locate and quantify unwanted sewer infiltration. Now, the total inspection length performed for the county is over 40 miles, or 208,000 linear feet.
Electro Scan uses focused electrode leak location (FELL) for its sewer inspection services. FELL is a trenchless method to accurately locate leaks in non-metallic sanitary sewer pipes. It locates leaks by using a simple focused electrode and analytical software.
Managing over 1,400 miles of gravity sewers and 788 lift stations, which transports & treats over 42 million gallons per day, tidal and wet-weather infiltration can oftentimes enter the county's sewer system through cracks, defective joints, and services connections, with additional risk to the underground aquifer system.
In previous projects, the county noticed that its leak detection data indicated that a small fraction of the pipes inspected were contributing to most of the unwanted inflow and infiltration flows entering the system.
Richard Cummings, the Division Director of Field Maintenance Services has remarked “We are always open to utilizing new technology to improve operations here in Hillsborough County. Electro Scan is interesting and innovative! In the past we performed expansive amounts of slip lining to correct physical defects. Our goal is to reduce I/I and the first objective is finding out where it is happening. Electro Scan is scalable, repeatable and quantitative. We believe in the technology and hope to utilize Electro Scan in all future I/I studies and if possible, procure Electro Scan for in-house work as well.”
For well over 3 years now, even through the COVID-19 pandemic, the county has been installing over 800 water meters per month at new housing developments. This rapid population growth is adding new flows to the county’s existing advanced wastewater treatment facilities, thus making I/I flow reduction a top priority.
Following previous successes elsewhere in the county’s 1,400-mile collection network, this current project is targeted to specific areas of the Falkenburg Sewer Basin where excessive I/I was identified by the company's engineering partner McKim & Creed, Inc.
The results from Electro Scan’s first two projects, totaling more than 30 miles, showed that only about one-third of the pipes were contributing nearly 75% of the potential I/I flows. The data generated in this newest project will allow the County to identify only those pipes contributing to I/I.
Given the company’s past successes with leak detection technology, the county is looking to now add Electro Scan’s inspection equipment to retrofit one of its CCTV inspection trucks and perform the work in-house with its own labor forces. Many other municipalities across the country have adopted this approach to modify its inspection fleet and conduct their own detection.