Many municipalities say they want a sewer crawler to last 10 years, but few put in the work to make that happen. Modern sewer inspection systems are highly-engineered equipment that require specialized care. You don’t let just anyone work on your jetter truck, so why take a casual approach to operating and caring for your crawler?

Sewer cleaning is an essential part of maintaining a healthy and productive wastewater system. There are a range of methods used depending on the needs at hand. To test your knowledge on the best practices for sewer cleaning, take our Sewer Cleaning Quiz and then challenge your coworkers to beat your score. 

Capacity, Management, Operations and Maintenance (CMOM) programs are a best practice for collection system owners and operators. Both comprehensive and holistic, a CMOM program is an information-based program to effectively run a collection system and help lower the risk of National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit violations and discharge violations. As the EPA notes in their Asset Management for Sewer Collection System Fact Sheet: "Lacking adequate focus on operations and maintenance, many collection system utilities have slipped into a reactive mode, with most of the operational resources allocated to emergency response and rehabilitation or replacement of failed components." Instead, a proactive and even predictive approach is encouraged by following a CMOM program.

The United States as a whole is urbanizing, so what happens to rural regions as they lose population? Due to their physical remoteness and sparse population, these areas pay a premium for water and sewer utilities—a problem that gets exacerbated as populations decline. Tens of millions of households, mostly in the eastern half of the nation, rely on septic tank systems when they lack a centralized sewer system, but these also lead to a slew of environmental and health issues that small neighborhoods must then address. A rural community in Delaware is attempting to remedy its wastewater challenges in a way the state hasn’t seen before.

For most of the U.S. and Canada, autumn is marked by falling temperatures, falling rain and falling leaves. For municipalities and sewer inspection crews, these seasonal changes bring new challenges. While stormwater systems are typically prepared for increases in the volume of water, the added leaf litter can aggravate the treatment process, overwhelm systems and exacerbate existing pipeline defects and deterioration.

Exfiltration is the leakage of wastewater out of a sanitary sewer system through broken or damaged pipes and manholes. Wastewater that leaks out of defective pipe joints and cracks may contaminate ground and surface water and cause a host of other problems, including pipe structure failures due to erosion of soil support, and ground subsidence due to erosion of underground soil. 

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.

A preventative maintenance program for sewer inspection equipment is the first step a municipality should take to maximize uptime and equipment longevity. Raleigh’s Department of Transportation, Stormwater Maintenance Unit (SMU) can attest to this. “We inspect 60,000 linear feet of pipe annually with our Quickview zoom camera and ROVVER X sewer camera,” says Don Hickman, CCTV Operations Crew Supervisor. Their ROVVER X system has been in service since early 2014. To this day, members of the community congratulate the crew on their new truck. “It is so gratifying to tell curious community members that our truck and equipment has been in service since 2014 and is on the road nearly every day. You can see the level of respect we gain in their eyes—so many municipal workers get a bad rap for not caring about taxpayers’ investments.”

Sinkholes can be both costly and deadly. The US Geological Survey estimates that sinkholes cause approximately $300 million in damage per year. Natural sinkholes form in Karst terrain—areas with bedrock that can be dissolved by groundwater, which are typically salt beds, limestone or other carbonate rock. Florida, which has large amounts of underground limestone, is particularly susceptible.

Natural sinkholes form when acidic water dissolves the bedrock, forming pathways and channels that are then filled with “overburden,” an upper layer of rock and soil. Man-made sinkholes can occur in any type of terrain, and may form when cracked or leaking pipes provide space for overburden to fall into a pipe and be carried away.