How Are Municipalities Faring When it Comes to Condition Assessment

When it comes to assessing and addressing their underground water and wastewater networks, municipalities across the country can be doing more in terms taking proactive and preventative measures, say industry leaders.

That’s the takeaway from our Condition Assessment Roundtable featured here. Cities struggle with budgets, workforce, escalating costs and technology every day, as they maintain, repair and rehabilitate these precious underground assets.

For a more in-depth assessment, we asked industry leaders for their front-row seat perspective and insight into this area. We asked them what are doing right, falling short of and what advice can they share with cities working to keep the water and wastewater flowing to their greatest assets: their customers.

Our panel:

• Alex Churchill, CEO, InfoSense
• Christoper Garrett, P.E, Technical Director, NASSCO
• Eric Sullivan, Director of Strategic Development, SewerAI
• Jax Vollmer: Technical Manager, AI Product Delivery, ITpipes

1. If you were to assign today’s municipalities a grade for how effectively they assess the condition of their water and wastewater infrastructure, what grade would you give them and why?

Alex Churchill

The most recent infrastructure report card gave wastewater infrastructure a D+, which may be a bit harsh, but it serves as an important wake-up call. Most systems are playing whack-a-mole with decades old infrastructure while balancing limited budgets, staffing constraints, and heavier regulatory requirements.

The industry is slowly moving in the right direction, but there is still significant room for improvement when it comes to understanding asset conditions at scale and using that information to drive maintenance decisions.

Christopher Garrett

Considering that in the United States we have approximately 800,000 miles of wastewater collection system and approx. 2.2 million miles of water distribution system, I would say that we are doing a decent job of maintaining the expected level of service to customers.

With that said, our buried linear assets are continuing to age with some assets in service beyond what one would expect as a reasonable service life. There are a variety of utility-specific reasons for this, but one could surmise that part of the issue is resource driven – principally staffing and funding.

Consequently, condition assessment seems to be more reactive than proactive. And a management criterion of asset inspection frequency every 5 or even 10 years is too much to ask for some utility owners based on the current resource limitations. Splitting this conversation into gravity vs pressure condition assessment, my observation is that the inspection and assessment of gravity linear assets is more mature than for pressure assets.

Leveraging asset management for prioritizing inspections, the use of CCTV and other inspection verification technologies, including the use of NASSCO’s PACP methodology, is moving us from reactive to a risk-based assessment mindset.  The limitation is availability of resources to effectively benchmark an asset’s condition over time. Historically, pressure asset inspection tools go well beyond video inspection, as we have a variety of pipe materials, access limitations, and operating conditions that require different structural assessment technologies to document condition.

The development of these inspection tools has occurred within the past 20 years and is evolving rapidly with the introduction of new inspection capabilities, machine learning, and the promise of AI-driven solutions.

Eric Sullivan

C+. The tools available today are better than they have ever been, and there is genuine effort in a lot of places. But effort and outcomes are not the same thing. Most utilities still lack a systematic, data-driven approach to deciding what gets inspected, when, and why. Inspection programs exist. What is rarer is a program where the data those inspections produce actually drives rehabilitation sequencing, capital planning, or risk scoring in a meaningful way.

The utilities earning an A are usually operating under a consent decree or have a strong internal champion who fought for a real asset management program. The rest are somewhere in the middle, inspecting what they can afford to inspect and hoping the gap between what they know and what they own does not catch up with them.

Jax Vollmer

I would give them a C-. The pattern we see over and over is that municipalities are reacting to problems rather than getting ahead of them.

Footage gets collected and saved to a flash drive that no one ever opens. Inspections happen when something breaks, not on a planned cycle. Contractors submit hot sheets, and municipalities accept them at face value with no independent review and no QA/QC process to speak of. The data exists in theory, but it is not being used.

The municipalities that score higher are the ones that have made a deliberate shift. They are televising to CMOM standards, running planned inspection cycles, and starting to explore AI-assisted coding. But those organizations are still the exception, not the rule.

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