Separate sanitary sewer systems are designed to convey sewage waste from municipal areas to a central treatment facility; they are not designed to handle water associated with precipitation events. However, intercept of groundwater (infiltration) and of flows through manholes or unauthorized connections (inflows) introduces rainwater into the sanitary sewer system. Infiltration/Inflow (I/I) inc...

Sewer systems that convey both sanitary sewage and storm water through a single pipe are referred to as combined sewer systems (CSSs). In dry weather, the CSS is able to convey all flows to the wastewater treatment facility. During periods of heavy rainfall, however, the capacity of the CSS may be exceeded and an untreated combination of sewage and storm water may discharged directly into a nea...

The objective of this paper is to describe an autoregressive regression framework with respect to metered sewer flow and simultaneous rainfall data series. The main purpose is to produce more reliable estimates for rain derived inflow and infiltration RDII characteristics in a sanitary sewer basin. The discussion is centered at three specific points: 1 a justification for an autoregressive erro...

Sewer systems are large-scale systems that collect and transport stormwater and sanitary sewage out of urban areas. Sewer systems are mainly operated using pumping stations and pollutants are removed from sewage by treatment plants before water is released into the environment. When a sewer overflow occurs, e.g., caused by a strong rainfall, sewage is discharged directly into the environment wi...

Assessing the condition of underground pipelines such as water lines, sewer pipes, and telecommunication conduits in an automated and reliable manner is vital to the safety and maintenance of buried public infrastructure. In order to fully automate the condition assessment of buried pipes, it is necessary to develop a robust defect analysis and interpretation system. This paper presents the dev...

Extreme climate events are becoming more intense in Melbourne in recent years. This increasing intensity of excessive rainfall has an adverse effect on the sewer network by causing sewage overflow hazards. Extreme rainfall events increase flow into the sewer system, both directly (inflow) and through infiltration into sewer. As a result of this Rainfall Derived Infiltration and Inflow (RDII), S...

A case study of Kingston, Ontario, reveals that growing confidence in the response of science and statistics to the threat of epidemic disease supported the development and expansion of municipal water and sewer services in the late nineteenth century. Informed by science and statistics, professional city managers and sanitary experts sought solutions combining fiduciary responsibility with pub...

Sanitary sewer overflows ~SSOs! are a major environmental issue. One of the major factors causing SSOs is the rain-derived inflow and infiltration ~RDII! to a separate sanitary sewer system. If a wastewater collection system is not well maintained, cumulative system-wide RDII could easily cause the wastewater conveyance and treatment capacity to be overwhelmed, and thus lead to SSOs. Monitoring...

Although Dickens is still known as having been a highly visible supporter of England's well-known nineteenth-century sanitary movement, he became, in fact, deeply troubled by many of this movement's fundamental tenets, as evidenced by journal narratives on fever that he edited and wrote in the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than water and sewer engineering works and a sanitary regime policed by...

The role of sewer lines as preferential pathways for vapor intrusion is poorly understood. Although the importance of sewer lines for volatile organic compound (VOC) transport has been documented at a small number of sites with vapor intrusion, sewer lines are not routinely sampled during most vapor intrusion investigations. We have used a tracer study and VOC concentration measurements to eval...