Sanitary Sewer System Condition Assessment and GIS System

Challenge

Shawnee County Public Works was responsible for service and maintenance on all sanitary sewer lines located outside of the city limits of Topeka, Kansas.

However, Shawnee County didn’t have any maintenance or service equipment to actually perform the work when the need arose. Shawnee County Public Works contracted with Ace Pipe Cleaning to perform televising, cleaning, and defect inspection of the immediate area of the Sherwood system surrounding the lake. This was the oldest part of the system and had not been inspected or cleaned since installation 60 years ago. Shawnee County needed a GIS tool to inform cost estimates for repairing the system.

Solution

Bartlett & West was the subcontractor for Ace Pipe Cleaning, responsible for building the GIS website for Shawnee County. The website took all data collected by Ace and showed each defect by location separated out by layers. This allowed users to overlay inflow and infiltration issues on top of root issues to see where they coincide. There was also a highly dynamic reporting function that ran a series of calculations to generate repair costs for the entire system.

Value

This automated cost calculation drastically shortened Shawnee County’s time to perform rate studies and allowed the County to focus dollars on the highest priority areas in need of repair. In addition, each defect was accompanied by a video and image showing the defect. This functionality consolidated efforts and presented them in a very easy-to-use and understandable format that had not been available from any software vendors until now.