NapaSan Puts the Ease in Easements!

Presentation Description: NapaSan has over 1,900 sewer main segments that are classified as easements. Easements are often difficult to access and can be easily neglected for inspection, cleaning, and rehabilitation. Without knowing how to access a sewer main located within an easement, we cannot inspect it to determine its condition, and therefore, cannot determine its priority for rehabilitation. We discovered that we had over 40 miles of sewer main, many of which were located within easements, that had never been inspected and couldn't be contracted for rehabilitation.

In order to address this issue, NapaSan dedicated a CCTV crew to focus on conducting video inspection of sewer mains that had never been inspected. The CCTV crew collected both access-related and pipeline condition data on the sewer mains within easements.

Over the course of 1 year, we were able to decrease the length of uninspected sewer mains from 40 miles to 10 miles, with approximately 6 of the 10 miles being large diameter pipelines that are outside the scope of our in-house capabilities, or that have been rehabilitated within the last 20 years.

We learned that age and material don't always tell the whole story. You don't really know the condition of a pipeline until you physically inspect it. We discovered that a force main that was replaced in 2002 was in critical condition and in need of immediate repair, but much of the1960's AC pipe was in relatively good condition.

The data we have gathered will feed into our collection system risk model to help prioritize future rehabilitation projects. The access-related data will also be used to inform future employees and contractors on how access the sewer mains for maintenance and rehabilitation.