Envirosight’s Phased Assessment Strategy for Sewers (PASS)

Adopting PASS helps you prioritize which lines need the most attention, and allows you to update your assessments more regularly.

Needing to understand sewer system condition more quickly, with fewer resources is something we see regularly. Adopting PASS helps you prioritize which lines need the most attention, and allows you to update your assessments more regularly. PASS will help you understand a new workflow that will save your department money, help optimize resource utilization, and allow your inspection crews to focus their attention on the sewer assets that need it most.

Sewer inspection is critical to the wellbeing of our wastewater infrastructure, our communities, and the environment.

Benefits of a well-rounded inspection program include (EPA, April 2010):

• Reduced sources of Infiltration and Inflow (I/I)
• Avoided emergency repair costs
• Avoided restoration costs due to environmental and property damage from a catastrophic failure
• Avoided public health costs (i.e., injury, death, disease transmission) from catastrophic failure
• Improved planning and prioritization of rehabilitation
• Improved customer satisfaction and fewer complaints

These benefits are the goal of every sewer department, but given today’s budgets, a new approach is needed—one that maintains the goal of comprehensive assessment, but which increases productivity and reduces costs.

The most exhaustive approach is seldom the most practical. CCTV crawlers gather the most detailed information from a pipe, allowing an operator to pan, tilt and zoom in on pipe features. They are the most commonly used inspection tool in our industry, and the most detailed method for inspecting the internal condition of a sewer. However, they are also the most time-consuming and labour-intensive to operate.

While CCTV crawler inspection is an essential tool in any condition assessment program, many lines don’t need the level of scrutiny a crawler offers. Rapid assessment tools like zoom cameras and video nozzles are ideal front-line tools for screening out such lines. If municipalities incorporate these tools into a three-phase approach to inspection, they can save significant time and money, and maintain more updated information about pipe condition.

If you are trying to meet increasing demands for infrastructure inspection with the same old workflows and technology, you’re fighting a losing battle. The evolving challenges of sewer inspection require adopting new technologies and methodologies to gain greater efficiencies and better data. Doing so can allow inspectors to prioritize system-wide which lines need the most attention, and to shorten the interval it takes to perform a complete system assessment.

View all of Envirosight’s Sewer Inspection Cameras.

Take a look at Envirosights Plan for Understanding Sewer Condition Quicker, With Fewer Resources