So, You Think You Can Inspect? The Saga of City-Wide Inspections in the Nation's Capital

The District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DC Water) currently oversees over $7.5 billion in assets and manages a ten-year Capital Improvement Program (CIP) with a budget exceeding $5 billion. To that end, DC Water launched a District-wide inspection program in the Spring of 2022 that aimed to inspect 40 miles of sanitary and combined sewers between 12 and 60 inches in diameter each fiscal year. Findings from these inspections would be used to identify and prioritize assets for rehabilitation under the CIP. Performing inspection work in any major city is no easy feat. Performing inspection work in the District of Columbia, one of the most densely populated cities in the United States that also houses a plethora of federal agencies and military bases, presented a multitude of unique complications. Along with more typical road blocks such as aging infrastructure leading to emergency repairs and unmapped assets discovered in the field, the surrounding stakeholders and property owners affected by the inspection program included foreign embassies, government agencies, the US Secret Service, Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, the National Park Service, the Smithsonian National Zoo, the DC Department of Transportation, a prison, and even disgruntled homeowner associations, to name just a few. The project team expertly handled an assortment of communications for permit acquisitions, access coordination, and stakeholder outreach. As if these circumstances were not challenging enough, the procurement timeline resulted in a tremendously accelerated inspection schedule during which 40 miles of inspection work had to be prioritized, performed, reviewed for quality, and invoiced all within the last five months of the fiscal year. Through an innovative use of new software tools, and copious amounts of coffee, this seemingly impossible feat was accomplished on time and on budget. The project team employed several programs and technologies to efficiently process inspection media and data in order to meet the ambitious deadline. T4 Spatial's inspection management platform, t4 Vault, allowed the inspection contractor to easily upload inspection submittals to the quality reviewer. The platform's user-friendly display showing the inspection media and reports side-by-side greatly facilitated quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) reviews. Additionally, InfoAsset Manager (IAM) was deployed in conjunction with t4 Vault to perform corrections to the NASSCO PACP and MACP databases. IAM also possessed useful capabilities to export tracking sheets documenting the status of inspections and inspection reviews. In the field, the project team employed the use of the Fulcrum app for field inspectors to easily submit daily logs and field entries. Crews also collected GPS using Terraflex. Dashboards using ArcGIS Online were developed to convey the most up-to-date inspection data in an easy-to-understand quantitative and visual format to the utility owner. The inspection program is now wrapping up its second fiscal year of inspections and, to date, has completed over 100 miles of pipe inspections and 3,000 manhole inspections.