STRATEGY FOR DEVELOPING A NEIGHBORHOOD-BASED SEWER RENEWAL PROGRAM IN EDMONTON, ALBERTA

In 1997, the City of Edmonton Drainage Services Branch initiated a multi-year R&D project to develop a methodology for producing an objective approach to determining which categories of sewers to perform CCTV inspection. Current practice is to perform condition assessment on pipe sections that are suspected of being in poor condition using closed-circuit television (CCTV) inspection. After the CCTV tape is assessed, the pipe section is assigned a structural condition rating and then ranked for remedial action. This paper describes the factors used in setting priorities for a neighborhood-based sewer renewal strategy employed by the City of Edmonton, Alberta. Currently, there are 131 official neighborhoods classified within the City of Edmonton. The two main factors used in developing a neighborhood renewal strategy were: 1) sewer rehabilitation factors; and 2) neighborhood prioritization factors. These factors were weighted based on importance using inputs from a cross-disciplinary panel of stakeholders representing various departments within the City of Edmonton and employed the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to generate the weights. Generating weighting factors, although somewhat subjective, provides another avenue in the analysis to weigh certain pipe classes of more importance over others for inspection and rehabilitation planning given limited resources.