After Decades of Severe Weather & Flooding and Billions Spent on Rehabilitation, Poll Finds That 78% Using CCTV Inspection Are Not Pleased With Results

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, USA, May 5, 2020 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Electro Scan Inc., a leading provider of machine-intelligent pipeline assessment products and services announced today that its April 29th webinar, showcasing its new strategic partnership with Innovyze^®, replaces the use of Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras to accurately locate & measure infiltration and test & certify pipeline rehabilitation as watertight.

Integrating Electro Scan’s innovative Focused Electrode Leak Location (FELL) low voltage internal pipe inspection technology directly into Innovyze's powerful asset management platform, InfoAsset^® Planner, municipalities and their consulting engineers can now develop a tailored risk-based decision matrix to dramatically improve locating and prioritizing major sources of infiltration.

Investor-owned and municipal utilities can now assess alternative capital repair strategies and quantify same-day rehabilitation effectiveness based on machine-intelligent measured defect flow reductions, rather than incomplete or inconsistent visual inspection.

Last week's one-hour webinar and original presentation can be found on the Electro Scan YouTube Channel. Bonus material is also made available in the Electro Scan PowerPoint Presentation (1gb file size), available for download.

The company's FELL technology precisely locates pipe defects within 1 cm and documents a potential infiltration flow rate for each defect, measured in gallons per minute, thus replacing CCTV inspection that is unable to find or quantify flow rates.

Inspection using CCTV is helpful when defective pipeline conditions are obvious; however, with nearly 4 million linear feet inspected to date with FELL technology, it can be stated that most often pipeline condition problems are not obvious and are simply missed by visual inspection.

Findings from webinar polling indicated:
1. 89% were NOT happy with their current I&I mitigation program.
2. 78% that used CCTV were NOT pleased with the results.
3. 58% allowed CIPP rehabilitation contractors to also inspect liners, using ineffective CCTV.
4. 52% that used CIPP for rehabilitation were NOT happy with their results.

Many utilities had previously adopted a business-as-usual-approach to finding & fixing infrastructure; however, a recent 'perfect storm' of events has brought a sense of urgency to discontinue using legacy pipe inspection technologies in order to achieve required resiliency for critical water infrastructure.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. has sustained over 250 weather and climate disasters since 1980 where the cost of damage to critical infrastructure from each event reached or exceeded $1 billion. Total costs exceeded $1.75 trillion.

During the last decade, the U.S. experienced more than twice the number of billion-dollar disasters than the previous ten years, 119 versus 59, with damages from severe storms & flooding having the greatest cost impact.

After spending billions on rehabilitation programs, worsening storm & flood events have resulted in unacceptable and unnecessary increases in flows to our nation's wastewater treatment plants, primarily due to unidentified leaks in underground pipelines that allow entry into the system and overflows into domestic drinking water supplies.

In many cases, higher flows have been a direct result of lackluster data from CCTV inspection; compounded by poor quality control of post-rehabilitation inspections using CCTV cameras that simply cannot certify pipes and customer connections as watertight.

In other words, municipalities and their ratepayers 'have not been getting what they are paying for.'

Occurring almost simultaneously with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, recent studies have shown that newly rehabilitated pipes can at times leak more, not less, after repair work.

"New technologies can be huge myth-busters to popularly-held beliefs," stated Chuck Hansen, Chairman & Founder, Electro Scan.

"In this case, FELL technology has provided unbiased & unimpeachable results that showed a poor track record in selecting rehabilitation and approving pipes that were later found not to be watertight using 50-year old camera-based and visual technologies; resulting in a lot of questions for multi-year CCTV projects currently underway in major cities," continued Hansen.

CCTV camera inspection had been a mainstay pipe inspection tool – once exclusively relied on for critical asset decision making; however, the arrival of FELL technology from California-based Electro Scan has caused utilities to question the reliability of prior testing.

The April 29th webinar, hosted by Innovyze, presented a first-of-its-kind end-to-end solution to inspect, analyze and prioritize rehabilitation programs, and finally to certify the completed work as conforming to contract requirements before pay applications are approved.

Selected case studies were presented during the webinar, and many others are available for review to compare to individual project needs, especially for certifying Cured-In-Place Pipe (CIPP).

New developments in Artificial Intelligence for CCTV inspection have easily shown the ability to overcome many of the inconsistencies of human reporting, providing a lower costing inspection and reporting alternative to using biased and ambiguous data.

Nevertheless, neither CCTV or AI-CCTV overcomes the inherent weaknesses of visual-based inspection when it comes to identifying leaks causing infiltration, poorly restored tap connections, or leaks caused by poor-quality CIPP or other trenchless reconstruction methods.


ABOUT ELECTRO SCAN
Headquartered in Sacramento, Calif., the company designs, develops, and markets proprietary pipe condition assessment equipment, delivers field services, and offers cloud-based data processing and reporting applications that automatically locate, measure, and report defects typically not found using legacy inspection methods. In 2020, the company was named to Government Technology’s esteemed GovTech 100 list for the second year in row. Electro Scan field crews and its authorized partners have been designated 'essential workers' adopting Coronavirus Health & Safety Standards, including appropriate use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and Social Distancing standards, in accordance with state mandates and CDC recommendations. Electro Scan is SafeContractor Approved.



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Carissa Boudwin
Electro Scan Inc.
+1 916-779-0660
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