With the start of summer comes hurricane season, but natural disasters—from blizzards to earthquakes—can disrupt daily life year round. The impact of natural disasters can be far-reaching and disrupt utilities and city operations. Floods, whether caused by snowmelt, hurricane, downpour or infrastructure damage, can quickly overwhelm collection systems and damage electric pump services. And earthquakes can destroy underground infrastructure in mere minutes.

Sewer laterals often don’t get much attention during regular CCTV inspections. Because municipalities are not responsible for them, they’re rarely on the usual schedule. This can leave a large portion of a collection system un-inspected, un-repaired and ready to cause problems. When laterals do end up on the docket, it’s usually for one of three reasons:

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When rehabbing a sewer pipe, one of the first decisions you make is whether to use spot repair or end-to-end methods. To help simplify this decision, we’ve designed a Sewer Rehab Strategy Worksheet that helps municipal workers and rehab contractors make quick decisions about which approach to utilize in any given line. Get it now:

Sewer rehabilitation is resource intensive. The larger and older a sewer is, the more frequently it requires maintenance, and the more costly and time-consuming that maintenance can be. Many municipalities rely solely on end-to-end (manhole-to-manhole) rehabilitation techniques like CIPP, pipe bursting and slip-lining to repair failing lines. While end-to-end methods can repair common defects in sewer pipe, in certain situations they can be overkill and a waste of time and money. That’s where spot (or point) repairs are more useful. Because of their targeted nature, spot repairs are able to address localized defects less expensively, faster, and often with less disruption than end-to-end methods. When a single line has multiple defects, however, the decision between spot and end-to-end methods requires careful consideration.

Biohazards are everywhere, in every handshake, sneeze and door handle. What matters isn’t where they are, but how you protect yourself against them. For the average person, regular hand-washing and up-to-date vaccinations are ample protection. But, much like people working in hospitals and medical labs, those who work in and around sewers are at an increased risk of infection and disease from biohazard exposure. And, much like doctors and nurses take extra care to limit that exposure, so should wastewater workers take similar precautions.

Being properly equipped makes sewer inspection more effective. Jim Legg, the Wastewater Operations Supervisor for the Uxbridge, MA Department of Public Works, knows this better than most. “When we got our ROVVER X in 2011, it was our first crawler system,” says Legg. “Before that we were using an old push camera that could only go 70 or 80 feet down a line. There was a lot that we just couldn’t do.” When Uxbridge decided to purchase their first crawler, they looked to their longtime dealer Brian Kennedy of JF McDermott. “We bought from him before and trusted what he had to say,” says Legg. The crew purchased a ROVVER X system installed into an Outpost transport enclosure. This gave them the portability to use the crawler how and where they needed, whether down narrow city streets or on easements. Since then, the crew has purchased a Jetscan video nozzle, a Verisight push camera and a Quickview airHD zoom camera.

When a sewer fails, the solution is seldom cheap or easy. Digging it up can be particularly costly, as well as disruptive to residential customers and road traffic. To avoid this, methods have emerged allowing sewers to be fixed without excavation. These methods are referred to collectively as “trenchless technologies.”

No two sewers pipes are alike. Many differ significantly in terms of size (both diameter and length), pipe material, effluent characteristics, service connections, soil composition and water table. Pipes also fail in different ways: they can crack, leak, settle, erode, corrode and collapse. These failures can be localized, or they can be pervasive. Moreover, the goal of rehabilitation can vary to include:

Your cutter can get pretty beat up in the sewers which makes regular maintenance so important. Regular maintenance can keep it running strong longer, but for a busy crew at the end of a long day, maintenance can fall by the wayside. The more often you forget to clean and check your cutter, the more damage is done, leading to downtime, decreased productivity and lost revenue. Municipal sewer rehabilitation contractors must protect their investment and business by ensuring that their equipment is in optimum working condition.  

Like other civil infrastructure in the U.S., many of our sewer, storm and water lines are over 50 years old (BAFuture). One of the biggest issues facing underground infrastructure is corrosion. A study from NACE International estimates the annual direct cost of corrosion for the water and wastewater industry is $36 billion. This cost includes replacing extremely corroded lines; lost water from cracks and breaks; application of corrosion inhibitors, internal linings and external linings; external coatings and cathodic protection.