Practice Review of the Cost of Condition Assessment and Renewal Engineering of Wastewater Pipelines as Part of the WATERiD Project

This paper summarizes recent efforts to capture some key economic, social, and environmental costs related to wastewater pipeline condition assessment and renewal engineering in a better way to help utility managers understand what factors drive project cost and, moreover, what are the true costs of the work to society as a whole. Data for the direct costs of two popular industry practices - namely CCTV pipeline inspection and CIPP liner installation - was gathered from wastewater utilities across the U.S. of varying size and location. Further, social and environmental costs were derived for each instance including traffic disruption, loss of business revenue, and the effect of noise pollution from construction on property values. Nearly 400 cost examples were collected from over 30 wastewater utilities. Direct, social, and environmental costs were then compared as a percentage of the total pipeline work cost to ascertain cost drivers. The results showed differing cost trends based on the parameters for the selected technologies, as well as values for the social and environmental costs accompanying these same technologies. The analysis further showed the gap between what data utilities are currently collecting and what they need to collect to understand the true cost. The exercise was a pilot study for capturing vast datasets in a uniform manner for advanced trend analyses in a centralized database as part of the WATERiD project.