Macomb County Public Works employee Zach Heaton operates a caged drone deployed 60 to 70 feet underground to inspect the county's miles of water and wastewater pipes. Jameson Cooke — MACOMB DAILY
The Macomb County Public Works Authority has implemented the latest technology to find defects in underground pipes much more quickly than before, saving money and virtually guaranteeing collapse.
Public Works Commissioner Candice Miller and other members of her staff gathered Monday at the Chapperton Pumping Station in St. Clair Shores to learn how the department uses flying and floating equipment to improve video quality during inspections. He demonstrated how artificial intelligence is applied to evaluate quality. Maintenance of water and sewage pipes within the county.
Operations and flow manager Vincent Astorino said the utility previously hired vendors to provide video inspections and engineers watched the videos and manually determined defects, a subjective process that lasted months and months. In some cases, it took several years.
The new process will provide data within a few days.
“This speeds it up dramatically,” Astorino said. “It's amazing compared to what we had before.”
“Now we can test wherever we want, whenever we want, and we'll have accurate, up-to-date information,” Miller said.
Astorino added that information with the human element removed is more consistent.
The total cost of the Flybotix drone and SewerAI software is $100,000, officials said, but that's a pittance compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that traditional processes cost.
The drone, which is equipped with a camera and lights and first used late last year, is operated by Zach Heaton, a six-year employee who has been trained to operate it. Wearing a hat emblazoned with his nickname “Captain Zack,” Heaton demonstrated the drone Monday, holding it several feet in the air inside the station.
“It's cool, it's interesting, it's fun,” said Heaton, also a station employee at Chapperton Station. “That's a good skill to learn.”
In the field, Heaton lowers the drone down a 60- or 70-foot shaft into a four-and-a-half-foot-diameter pipe, maneuvering the drone up to 12 feet in diameter, and passing through about 1,000 feet of pipe at a time until the battery dies in about 25 minutes. Let me do it. Officials spoke within minutes. By rotating multiple batteries, Heaton and his staff can inspect thousands of feet a day, Astorino said.
The drone is splash-proof and has sensors to keep it from getting too close to walls, but officials say it includes a 16-inch cage for added protection if something goes wrong in tight spaces. said the person.
Miller said Macomb County could become the first public works agency in the state to use underground drones and AI software to detect defects.
The utility has already been using aerial drones to record water flow and the 500 open channels it monitors for about five years.
For pipes with flowing water, public works officials built a unique floating device equipped with a GoPro camera that provided 3D video recording of the inside of the pipe for the AI to analyze and provide a report. The device was lowered into the manhole, and the wastewater flow carried the raft along while the camera captured 360-degree video of the pipe.
As part of the department's asset management plan, engineers are building a database from inspections of about 60 miles of pipe conducted in 2017, 2020 and 2023, officials said. Officials said they have submitted inspection data for more than 400,000 linear feet of pipe and 650 manholes. In one of the first reassessments of previous data, artificial intelligence found several more structural problems in the sewers.
Recently, using SewerIA software, previous data was “more deeply analyzed” and two large pipes in the Macomb Interceptor drainage that were candidates for update no longer require immediate retrofit lining. , assured public works engineers that it could be postponed to focus on efforts elsewhere. An estimated $4 million in short-term savings could be made within the district's long-term capital improvement plan.
Mr Miller said new technology was needed to avoid a repeat of the infamous 2016 Fraser cave-in that closed 15 Mile Road for nearly a year and cost $75 million to repair.
“If we learned anything from the terrible cave-in infrastructure disaster that occurred on 15 Mile Road many years ago, we learned the need for inspection. “within the dollars we have,'' said Miller, who took office just days after the incident.
He said the new inspections will “enable our management to put together a capital improvement program to ensure our infrastructure is properly maintained and does not experience breakdowns.” We end up saving literally millions of dollars. ”
