Geography and climate play a big role in the development of sewer inspection workflows. The changing seasons affect the ground and buried infrastructure: The winter months bring freezing and contraction, while warmer weather thaws and loosens the earth. Some communities have no problem inspecting sewers and conducting rehab year-round, but others are limited by these weather patterns.
How Does Cold Weather Affect Sewer Inspection?
There are several ways cold weather can impact sewer inspection. Limited access to manholes is one of the most obvious challenges. Snowfall and freezing temperatures can also make roads especially hazardous, posing a danger to inspection teams and other drivers on the road. And even when teams are able to get through an icy manhole to lower a crawler, wet or icy roads put them at added risk of traffic collision.
For this reason, many municipalities in colder climates develop a workflow that limits on-site sewer inspections during the winter months.
What Are Inspection Teams Doing To Solve the Problem?
When manholes become inaccessible, inspection teams shift focus from data collection to in-office coding.
Municipalities know what to expect when it comes to the impact of weather on their geography, roads and sewer infrastructure. Inspection teams in areas with heavy snowfall usually plan on shutting down CCTV truck operations for several months as weather conditions worsen. While this would put a significant strain on more traditional inspection workflows, these cold climate inspection teams work to collect footage during warmer months and code or analyze inspection footage when that infrastructure is buried under snow and ice.
Sewer inspection solutions like WinCan VX and Web Flex make this workflow just as convenient as collect-and-code workflows, providing an intuitive interface where operators can quickly drag and drop inspection footage into a media bucket for future coding. Field teams can focus on getting from one manhole to the next without delay, gathering more footage and completing all field work during warmer months. Then, once the cold weather arrives, teams have everything they need to code footage throughout the winter. In fact, WinCan Web Flex makes it even easier to code on-the-go with project creation and editing capabilities, meaning teams can code from the safety of their own homes as long as they have an internet-enabled device.
To learn more about how WinCan supports seasonal workflows, schedule a demo of WinCan Web Flex:
