ORDER-2022-22 : Informational Update - Sewer Asset Management Grant Progress

Transcript (~22 min @ 2:56:10)

Speakers identified by voice; unnamed voices are numbered within this recording. Auto-caption text — verify against the video.

▶ 2:56:19 Speaker 4: I'll keep this brief because of the hour but I'll give you a little bit of why I'm here and then I have to figure out how to be able to operate that while I'm near a microphone the sewer asset management grant is one that you approved last year it's a state revolving fund grant through MassDEP it was in the amount of $60,000 and then we had a $20,000 match and a $20,000 in-kind services component the grant deadline is the contract deadline is august 30th and one of the pieces of our our requirements was to present what we've done to the public and since this board a lot of the the impetus for this project came from this board i thought the best forum to present the information of what we've done was to present it to you all in case you had questions about what we've done but given that the grant deadline is august 30th and we we just completed a lot of the work and you know we wrapped it up in the last few weeks so we really couldn't have presented it earlier so that's hence the request for immediate consideration and we're not looking for any actual vote i understand that in the future this might be there might be a better way for us to put this into the queue instead of an order as just an informational item but we will figure that out for the next time so let me see

▶ 2:58:30 Speaker 2: if I can switch over should be so this Chromebook was

▶ 2:59:08 Speaker 2: back to us

▶ 3:00:55 Speaker 2: That's a good sign.

▶ 3:01:03 Speaker 3: this is kind of, yes. Yes?

▶ 3:01:27 Speaker 2: I see it. No. All right.

▶ 3:01:31 Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Can we use your settings?

▶ 3:01:36 Speaker 2: Can we use your settings? It was right there. It should just.

▶ 3:01:54 Speaker 3: And I might have to come over here to the end

▶ 3:01:56 Speaker 2: for a few minutes that we'll then. Oh, okay. Yep.

▶ 3:02:02 Speaker 4: In the beginning.

▶ 3:02:05 Speaker 4: Okay, thank you for your patience. So as I said, this is just an update on our sewer asset management project.

▶ 3:02:14 Speaker 2: Next slide, next.

▶ 3:02:17 Speaker 4: These were the tasks that were part of the grant application and then thus part of the work that we did. So we developed a strategy for asset management focused solely on our sewer collection system. So the pipes and manholes in our sewer mains and pump stations. And then we updated our wastewater GIS environment. um we developed mobile apps we in order to gather data from the field on our sewer system we purchased hardware and software we have five of these really slick new tablets we're waiting for the right cases to come in these have been deployed to our field staff and we've done training for our field staff we recently had a training where the consultants from cdm smith trained our water sewer and highway some of our foreman and more senior staff as well as engineering and some of our management to be able to use these in the field next slide so the updates that we did and I know some of this was part of a discussion with the council earlier on but we were missing a lot of the age data in our sewer gis so they poured through all of our historic plans all of our historic tie card information as to when services went in and came up with an age for almost every sewer pipe in the city so they populated all of that data then they also went through our inspection videos and reports and they updated any missing data on sewer sizes and sewer materials so we now have all of that and I'll I'll show that to you in a minute when I go back over to the computer and then internally we scanned all of our 8,000 plus tie cards so every single house has a card in a book that shows how it connects from the house out to the street we've scanned all of those in-house and named them by address and then we had an intern this summer who linked them all to the parcels in the the gis database so i'll show you that as well when i go over we can now click on a parcel and see the sewer tie card um and then we put all the data online in a a password protected system but it all sits in the cloud now so it's accessible from anywhere that we are and cdm smith did a qaqc check on all the data

▶ 3:04:42 Speaker 4: next so we now have five applications that are actually all on these tablets so the staff in the field has these different links for the different esri online products and so they can go to a map of our entire sewer system and then they also have those are the first two that allow you just to basically view the data they have collector forms so we have if there's a sewer blockage we now have a form where we collect all the data that we need right there in the field we can take pictures link it to the to the incident it's going to help immensely with our claims process which tends to be lengthy when we're trying to gather all the information of when did we first hear about the problem and what time did we respond and who responded that's all going to be in the forms that the guys will now enter into the tablets right there in the field we're also going to start tracking all of our sewer line cleaning so when we do have an issue and we're asked well when was the last time you were out there what did you find we'll have data that says the last time we cleaned a pipe whether we found roots or grease or other blockage issues or you know anything that we find in the pipes that'll all be documented and that's using both the survey123 and the collector app and then there's a dashboard that allows us to see the aggregate of the data like how many blocks did we have last year how many were in the sewer mains how many were in sewer services um and and that sort of data next okay and then i just want to show you a couple things on the actual computer there

▶ 3:07:21 Speaker 4: okay so this is the new map and

▶ 3:07:27 Speaker 4: we're not seeing a map oh it's not on the screen now okay

▶ 3:07:37 Speaker 4: there you go there's a map okay um so from this map we can zoom in on any pipe in the city we can click on it we actually have now linked all of our old sewer plans so this is actually the original plan from you know probably the 1930s or so it shows the whole sewer profile and everything so that's all linked to the maps every one of those plans no matter where you click you find a plan and the

▶ 3:08:05 Speaker 4: red pipes are MWRA the green pipes are ours and then these dots here are we just during training we entered in fake blockages just to practice using the form so if you clicked on this blockage you would see the customer name date and

▶ 3:08:24 Speaker 4: time the weather again when did DPW become aware of the issue how was it reported who reported the issue so that this is all the data that we need to be gathering when we have a blockage to facilitate the whole process that follows and then in the actual GIS so this that's this is more the dashboard that the guys will have out in the field and then this is what I have in the office and so this is every manhole in the city and then every pipe that connects it and I can zoom in on an area and I can click for information on the

▶ 3:09:04 Speaker 4: pipe I got a street name by mistake and here we have the pipe size the year it was installed so this one's 1897 it's on Ashland Street and six inch diameter and so I can go to I can go to the

▶ 3:09:35 Speaker 4: attribute table for this entire layer and so if I want to see like you're installed I can sort it from newest to oldest and I can see the ones at the top are Regan's Way because that was recently installed Boardman Ave was recent we don't have Patrick's place in there yet but that's new and Blueberry Hill Lane those will be brand new sewers but you can see the year installed category we now have data for

▶ 3:10:04 Speaker 4: almost every pipe in the city and so now we can we can map it we can say I want to see every pipe that's older than we can say I want to clean every pipe that's that's a hundred years old and prioritize that and then the the field staff will enter those forms in and then we'll see those all light up on the map as clean and it's all real time when they're out in the field and they fill out a form and show that they've cleaned a pipe someone else on a tablet two streets over who wants to know did they finish that one yet it's real time as soon as they click submit on the form every tablet every device sees that information so it's pretty cool we're moving into this century finally so

▶ 3:10:48 Speaker 2: that's it thank you

▶ 3:10:51 Speaker 4: we might eventually make the tie card links oh so I didn't show you that but that's just if you click on a parcel you can go here to hyperlinks and it'll pull

▶ 3:11:14 Speaker 4: up the this is the scanned page from the book that shows how this property ties into the sewer and exactly where the connection is made as compared to the next manhole it's ten point two three feet from the downstream manhole and it's a hundred ninety point four feet from the manhole on this side and so we eventually make that available to the public so people can look up their information about their own house but there are generally there are water and wastewater security issues where you don't want to publish the entire gis database of your entire system because then if somebody wants to do something right you know nefarious exactly then they have all the information great thank you okay

▶ 3:12:01 Speaker 3: thank you thank you richard any any questions quick question council chairman tozy

▶ 3:12:13 John N. Tramontozzi: um elena fascinating i um i was just wondering is any way we can adapt that to track the movement of rats in the city to tracking what the movement of rats in the movement of the rats i'm teasing it away but there is as you know that i have uh occasionally had we've all had complaints from

▶ 3:12:31 Speaker 4: um citizens but uh i mean you could certainly have an online form where whoever if it's the health department whatever department is getting the rat complaints could certainly drop a point on a map that says rats and then you could see where all the rat complaints are or if you want to go put little tracking devices on their legs you can thank you thank you mr president anybody

▶ 3:12:54 Shawn M. MacMaster: outside councilman mcmaster thank you mr president thank you miss paracas ellis for that presentation how much of the data regarding the location of sewer backups is historical or is that all

▶ 3:13:07 Speaker 4: perspective and so what we have right now for sewer backups is paper forms that have been scanned in so we have those dating back many years but those aren't being populated this is really from this moment moving forward um because we have the data if we ever needed to recall something about an old backup we can just look up the scan of the paper form by year um so this will be just

▶ 3:13:33 Shawn M. MacMaster: moving forward so is there so that will be so in the future if there's backup that will be input into the system absolutely yeah is there any reason even though the information exists because the information exists on tie cards in terms of the makeup of a of a pipe or the year of the pipe is there any reason that historical information wouldn't be input or wasn't input as part of this

▶ 3:13:56 Speaker 4: process about backups or backups um we just didn't see a need because the the frequency with which we need to go back and look at old backups is infrequent but um you know we could we could enter in data about old backups at some point just so that we know where there have been multiple backups or that sort of thing but we kind of have that we have this the sewer periodical list which are the sewers that we go out and check every month because we know they're problem areas and we know where those are um so you know that that's really fed that that's been fed by the data about historic backups if we find that there's a use for that we can absolutely go back and and start inputting you know just so we have them in the system i know in in a prior community where i worked i had done that with water main breaks i created a new layer we started tracking our water main breaks like this and then i thought well i'd like to go back and input all the old ones so we went back like 30 years of historic records and put those on the map too so that when we had a new break we could see is this a chronic problem area or or not so it's something we could consider

▶ 3:15:07 Shawn M. MacMaster: doing if we felt there was a benefit so when when you talked about problems that originate in either the main line or the lateral line that's information that you'll be looking to collect

▶ 3:15:16 Speaker 4: moving forward yes so that's part of the form is the form that they would answer on here was whether the backup was in the main or in the private service yeah and just one additional

▶ 3:15:25 Shawn M. MacMaster: question have any protocols been developed for dpw when responding to a backup in terms of utilizing the tool so if there's a is there a backup if there's a backup is there something that's supposed to happen with respect to looking information up first before any decisions are made in terms of how to proceed or is this just to have when there's a question that arises as the end to a response yeah the intent I mean

▶ 3:15:53 Speaker 4: since we're just starting to use it and if we're just starting from today moving forward then there's not going to be a lot of data at the beginning but the intent would be that when you get out there and you take your tablet out with you in the field and you look at the location where there's a backup you would see those red dots for other backups and you would know oh there were six backups here in the last year and every time they were marked as heavy grease so that's what we're going to be encountering you know most likely so that would be part of the protocol moving forward is that not only are you entering the data but you're also using the data that you have to to decide the best path forward

▶ 3:16:38 Cory Thomas: thank you thank you mr president counselor thomas thank you mr president um it's an incredibly large amount of information and data that's been put into that gas mapping um kudos to you and the dpw staff and i believe you said an intern for doing all that work um thank you for the

▶ 3:16:55 Christopher Cinella: presentation uh motion to place on file second motion place on file made by counselor thomas seconded by counselor eccles any other discussion seeing none all those in favor aye aye aye any

▶ 3:17:12 Speaker 2: opposed see none thank you thank you order 2022-23 acceptance of 50 000 from a fy2022 state budget earmark providing grants to council on aging gotta go to the appropriations committee order 2022-24 request for the authorization to issue 1.5 million bond to fund for the roadway component of the city's multi-year utility and roadway improvement program that will go to appropriations any new business order 2022-25 amending chapter 198 article 2 section 198-2 of the revised ordinances of the city of melrose collection and disposal that will go to legal and legislative committee

▶ 3:17:57 Christopher Cinella: and orders from committee we do have quite a few hold on sorry uh i guess we'll start with we'll