Cameras help locate infrastructure planning error

Problem: A contractor in Winnipeg, Canada, was on site and having a hard time determining why a customer’s basement was flooding shortly after redoing the sewer lateral from the house to the mainline. 

Solution: The contractor ran an ANACONDA HD pan-and-tilt push camera from Fiberscope.net by MEDIT into a manhole and down the mainline pipe past the house cleanout to determine that the connection was dry. Using the pan-and-tilt head, they looked sideways and could tell that the line was not blocked. They ran a second smaller VIPER HD drain camera through the lateral from the house to the road but could not see the smaller drain camera enter the mainline. Using the sonde in the ANACONDA HD camera head, they made sure the cameras were at the right junction by tracing the camera head under the road to confirm that everything was lined up properly, but the two cameras were not intersecting. City plans had to be pulled, and it was determined that the city had an abandoned line that was deeper than the newer mainline, which was installed over it. The city plans had not been updated with the difference in the depth of these, so the new house lateral had been tied into the old, abandoned mainline, causing the backup. 

Result: Because the cameras were used, the city was able to update its plans and dig out the road to properly connect the house line to the new mainline. 877-613-2210; www.fiberscope.net

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Program helps utility pinpoint pipes needing service

Problem: A leader in the Smart Growth movement, the Virginia city of Arlington sought to adhere to a set of principles that help make it the leader in sustainability and development for its 233,000 residents. With a whole county of sanitary sewers to inspect, and three to four crews performing CCTV inspection every day, Arlington knew it had to maximize productivity where it could while minimizing disruption to residents. 

Solution: Utilizing ITpipes, Esri and Cartegraph, Arlington was able to streamline its workflow and maximize productivity. The chief engineer selects an area of the county from the Esri ArcGIS map within Cartegraph, issuing work orders for the assets within that selected area. These work orders are automatically pushed to the CCTV inspection vehicle’s ITpipes Mobile. There, operators can see what pipes they are being assigned to inspect. All the asset information is already populated, and once the inspection is completed, the inspection is uploaded from the trucks. The inspection is now available to all Arlington stakeholders on ITpipes Web, and the Cartegraph work order is automatically addressed. ITpipes Web’s SmartTabs dynamically filters any pipe inspection that meets Arlington’s predetermined criteria for follow-up cleaning or service, placing it into a separate list for review.

Result: “We are very focused on maintaining our buried assets in Arlington,” says Jeremy Hassan, P.E. “The new workflow has almost eliminated duplicate efforts and allowed us to track pipes that need follow-up, holding a work order until it’s complete. Now, once the data is collected, it is spread across the county for all to see, so it is hard to ignore issues with the pipes and forces them to be addressed.” 877-487-4737; www.itpipes.com