A robot that is checking the conditions of city sewers could also someday save your life
Part one in a series on how the City of Poulsbo is preparing for a decade of growth
By 2025, Poulsbo’s population is expected to increase by more than 50 percent to almost 15,000, according to the city’s Comprehensive Plan.
City planners and leaders are taking a proactive approach to this anticipated growth, attempting to figure out now where to best situate the 2,251 new homes and apartments that will be needed, how to deal with more cars on streets and highways, and how to dispose of lots more trash and waste — all the while addressing the repair or replacement of an aging infrastructure that in some parts of town dates back to the 1940s.
There are no alligators in Poulsbo sewers (but there’s lots of other stuff)
That’s money you’re flushing down your toilet.
You pay Kitsap County for every gallon of water you send to the county’s waste treatment plant across the bay near Brownsville. The city (and that means you, the taxpayer) also pays to build and maintain the necessary sanitary and storm water sewers. And the costs are going to be going up (more people equals more dishwashers, more washing machines, more baths and showers, more flushes …).
One area where the city is trying to save you money is by practicing prudent preventative maintenance, and proactively planning for necessary sewer repairs and replacement. Remember the “seven P’s”: Proper Prior Planning Permits Practically Perfect Performance.
“Being more proactive reduces the likelihood that Mr. Murphy will show up,” Poulsbo Public Works Superintendent mike Lund said, referring to Murphy’s Law. ”We’re getting better at pre-planning.”
When it comes to sewer and stormwater lines, that means starting by inspecting and mapping what’s already there. “That way you can better plan for repairs and replacements rather than waiting until something breaks,” Lund said. That requires eyeballing every foot of the 51 miles of sanitary sewer main line, the 25 miles of laterals (the smaller pipes from the main line to homes), and the 61 miles of stormwater pipe.
Put all of Poulsbo’s wastewater pipes end-to-end and they would reach from Tacoma all the way south to the Oregon border.
What’s in those miles of pipes eventually flows into large pipes called “siphons” that carry it across the bottom of Liberty Bay from Lemolo to Pump Station 16 in Keyport and then on to the Kitsap County treatment plant near Brownsville, where it is filtered, treated and discharged.
It would have cost $300,000 to $400,000 to hire a consultant to inspect and map the lines. “And that would have been a one-time thing,” Lund said. “We would have had to pay to have it done again in the future.” So, instead of hiring a consultant, Public Works paid $245,000 and bought their own brand-new Utility Video Inspection Truck, usually known simply as “the camera truck.”
The camera truck arrived in early 2016. It came complete with computers, monitors, powered wind-up reels, and a six-wheeled camera robot. The robot can travel 1,500 feet through a sewer line as well as send its onboard “side shooter” eyeball camera snaking 120 feet up a home’s lateral line. The truck also has a big water tank and high-pressure pump for washing the you-know-what off the robot when crew pull it out of the sewer, and a big electrical generator.
Oh, and a souped-up Nintendo PS2 controller to run the robot.
“[But] it’s a lot more complicated than playing a game,” said Tom Barnes, the senior maintenance technician who remotely drives the robot from inside the truck. “Sometimes, you need three hands to do everything that needs doing all at once.”
“We’re still learning the truck,” said Rick Hoskins, senior maintenance technician. Besides Barnes and Hoskins, the camera truck crew includes Maintenance Technician 2 Shane Johnson who helps wrangle the robot’s hundreds of feet of fiber optic and power cables (“It’s just like fishin’!”), and Traffic Controller Regan Myhere who has the team’s backs while they are working.
Public Works officials expect it will take a year to map the whole system the first time. After that, the plan is to re-inspect 25 percent of the system every year so that once every four years the whole town is done.
The camera truck paid for itself in savings on one of the first jobs it did, the current Hostmark Street project.
“We planned to just dig up [that part of Hostmark] and replace the storm water line,” Superintendent Lund said. “We had a grant for $250,000 to repave the street when we got done … When they ran the camera through the sewer line there, we discovered it was cracked and broken … clay pipe that probably went in during the 1950s. So now we are replacing the sewer line, too. Otherwise, in five years we would be back digging up the street again and this time the folks in Poulsbo would have had to pay the $250,000 to repave it.”
As if saving you money isn’t enough, the camera truck could save your life, too. If “The Big One” ever hits, emergency responders have plans to use the robot and its side shooter camera to search for survivors in collapsed buildings.
