Roy Hardester of Pipe Peepers LLC checks for cracks and sags. |
Since the mid 1990s, the City of Erie has used a ROVVER remotely-operated video inspection crawler from Envirosight to help monitor its aging sewer lines. Designed to carry a robotically articulated camera hundreds of feet into pipelines, the crawler is used by Stano's team in identifying all forms of deposits, foreign matter, cracks, deformations, offsets and erosion. Once repairs have been made, the crawler is deployed again to verify and document them.
"The entire pipeline inspection and repair process has been finely honed by our technicians and mangers," Stano said. "We use the crawler to take detailed pipe imagery, which is captured on tape or DVD for review by project managers. After maintenance needs are recognized and addressed, the crawler is employed on-site again to review the work and make sure the problems have been solved."
Although many challenges still exist for the City of Erie, Stano sees improvement on a daily basis.
"Ten years ago, we cleared about 300 plugged mains annually. This year, we're expecting to work on fewer than 100. Claims against the city for basement flooding have also been greatly reduced."
Raleigh, NC, also employs video pipe inspection as part of its preventative maintenance program. Chet Lepley, supervisor of Street Maintenance, has become the official overseer of the city's efforts to ensure safe streets through cost-effective maintenance practices. This effort includes identification and repair of problems related to the stormwater pipe system residing under the city's streets and adjacent to more than 2,000 miles of city-owned curb lines.
"Our job is to ensure the positive flow of our city's stormwater pipelines," Lepley said. "We identify the cause of problems as they arise, spot-check potentially troublesome areas, perform some repairs ourselves, and review the repair efforts of outside contractors." Large capital projects are sent to the Stormwater Utility division for design and cost.
To combat ongoing challenges posed by the public stormwater system, as well as to expedite inspection and repair, in 2004 Raleigh initiated a new Stormwater Utility fee to better fund maintenance needs throughout the city. One of the first benefits of this new program was the purchase of an Envirosight ROVVER.
"We were constantly guessing on problems and locations. Many times, our crews would dig up three to four sections of pipe to find one bad joint," Lepley said. "From day one, the crawler increased our productivity and decreased our costs by allowing us to easily and quickly identify all kinds of problems, including stress fractures, holes and intrusions."
In addition to the crawler, the City of Raleigh also purchased two Envirosight QuickView® zoom inspection cameras. Since 2006, the Raleigh Stormwater Utility division has used the cameras as a tool to better describe below-ground drainage systems that were previously inaccessible to field crews.
"Our division is working hard to be more proactive," said Dustin Brice, GIS Specialist with the Raleigh Stormwater Utility division. "We've used a two-man QuickView crew to find and locate illegal connections to the drainage system. In addition, this equipment helps the city generate more accurate maps of the stormwater system, as well as check for buried inlets, corrosion, debris and other infrastructure issues. This information is then shared with all departments as a resource for infrastructure planning, illegal and hazardous spill containment, and rapid location of pipes."
Conclusion
The need to cost-effectively maintain and upgrade sewer and wastewater pipeline infrastructure has become a paramount concern for municipalities nationwide faced with aging systems, growing populations and funding shortfalls. For many communities, pipeline video inspection technologies have provided judicious answers in an increasingly tight economic climate.
