Santa Barbara’s collection system relies on a cleaning cycle ranging from one month to 60 months. While they have been successful at reducing SSOs through increased cleaning efforts, they looked to further enhance efforts. Santa Barbara discovered that the majority of SSO events occurred from 6-in pipes on a 60-month cleaning cycle. Based on cost, speed and simplicity, they chose the SL-RAT to acoustically screen these lines to get a quick understanding of pipe conditions and deploy resources appropriately.

“We wanted to clean or inspect more. Prior CCTV work has helped us find structural defects and generate a rehabilitation backlog. The SL-RAT allows us to inspect much more pipe now and find blockage conditions before they create an SSO.”

– Chris Toth Santa Barbara Wastewater Manager.

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Augusta, Georgia has been under a consent order from the Georgia Department of Environmental Protection to do a system wide evaluation. With the mission of mapping and evaluating their entire system, the SL-RAT has been a pivotal instrument for quickly screening small-diameter pipes for blockages. Their one SL-RAT crew is averaging 7,000 ft of pipes assessed per day, which in combination with root and grease control programs has reduced overflows by 25%.

“We’re taking baby steps, but the SL-RAT is one of those things that’s turning the baby steps more into a full stride. I honestly can’t say enough good things about it.”

– Jody Crabtree Asset Manager for Augusta Utilities Department

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The City of Charlotte, NC maintains more than 229,000 connections through 4,100 miles of sewer collection pipe. To address the challenge of maintaining this complex collection infrastructure, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities Division (CMUD) partnered with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2005 to develop technologies for pipe inspection. The developed acoustic inspection technology, called SL-RAT, has inspected over 1 million feet of sewer pipe, demonstrating that the SL-RAT can quickly provide operators with valuable information on pipe conditions.

“We’re saving money and saving our time with the us of acoustics. You can see immediately what needs to be cleaned, so it takes the guesswork out and focuses your efforts.”

– Jon Beam, Environmental Program Inspector for CMUD

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