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www.mybaycity.com May 9, 2010
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Sewer Inspection Program In Progress

Robot cameras crawl places where no man has gone before.

May 9, 2010       Leave a Comment
By: Stephen Kent

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Perhaps you received the "Notice to Residents" letter from the City indicating that the sewers in your area are to be inspected. The letters are generally sent out five days before an area is to be surveyed.

The notice explains that the City has contracted with Doetsch Environmental Services to inspect the combined sewer pipes in the city. This inspection uses a robotic camera system that rolls through the sewers taking pictures.

When the truck parked across the street from my house I couldn't resist the opportunity to see what was going on. The technician was kind enough to show me the system and explain how it works.

The camera is a $100,000 device that can crawl through pipes and relay pictures via a fiber optic cable. Different size cameras can inspect pipes from 6 inches to 72 inches.


The camera unit is a cylinder with four wheels. A tiny camera is mounted in each end and surrounded by a strobe flash. As the unit rolls through the pipe the cameras take several high resolution still images each second. Back in the truck the stills are stored then combined into a "movie".

The "movie" is truly remarkable. The technician can "drive" forward or backward and rotate the point of view in a full panorama, up, down, left, right or just sit and spin if your stomach can take it.

Most of the sewers in my part of town are concrete. But the manhole access is still an old brick vault with pipes coming in from the sides. The truck goes to an intersection and drops the camera into the manhole then runs it to next manhole. The lines are anywhere from 6 to 72 inches in diameter.


The section I got to see was relatively clear until the camera reached the next manhole. There it found a large white object in the middle of the 10 inch pipe. "That's a chunk of concrete that fell out near the manhole a couple of blocks back", said the technician. They had seen it before the heavy rain a couple of weeks earlier. When asked how it got to this point the tech said "oh the water pushes it down after that rain. You'd be amazed how powerful water can be."

The notice from the city suggests that "residents might want to cover their basement floor drains with a rag and keep their commode cover shut while they clean the sewers with hydraulically propelled equipment."

Doetsch is not doing the cleaning but they do use a piece of equipment that can suck the water out of the pipes. The city recommends pouring a cup or two of water into your floor drains to be sure that the traps are filled. This will help prevent sewer odors from entering the house.


Technicians work in a office-like environment during the survey



Cameras on each end of the robot take thousands of high resolution, wide angle still images facing forward and back.



With the forward camera seeing the concrete pipe, the rear camera sees the junction at the old brick manhole. The photo taken of the screen does not do justice to the high resolution of the actual images.



The robot at the bottom of the manhole just before being removed.



After being winched up, the camera unit is rolled onto a track and locked down for transport to the next manhole.




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Stephen Kent

Steve Kent and his family have lived in Bay City for 40 years. He is VP of Technical Services at MMCC which produces MyBayCity.Com. Kent is active in many Bay City civic organizations.

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