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During the City Council’s work session Monday night, council members were given a report by Bryan Kaemingk, of WHKS, regarding the city’s sanitary sewer evaluation.

Specifically, the report centered on inflow and infiltration concerns across the city’s 672,000 feet of gravity sewer and 2,600 structures.

The study has been ongoing for six-seven years and will also act as a road map of where to direct attention in the coming years.

“What to fix, where to put dollars at,” Kaemingk told the board.

The study focused on a number of inflow areas including roof drain connections, sump pump or foundation drain connections, deteriorated manholes, uncapped or broken clean-outs and storm cross connection.

But it also concentrates on how water is getting into the system where infrastructure is compromised due to things like root intrusions, open joins and broken or cracked pipes.

During the presentation, the evaluation showed that estimated repair costs of the infrastructure comes to around $14,730,000 total with $10.7 million of that directed toward estimated pipe repair costs and nearly $4 million needed for manhole repair costs.

In the coming years, the city will have to determine how to approach these based on areas like the calculated likelihood of failure for pipes, the calculated consequence of failure for each pipe, calculated risk of failure for each pipe.

It will also factor in the needs based on manholes as well.

In evaluating risk based on specific criteria, some of those elements that will help determine this will be things like health and safety, critical users, construction impact, environmental compliance and service area.

The city will also have to take into account how likely the infrastructure asset is to fail based on the condition of the asset, performance of the asset and maintenance history.

The survey was launched in 2018 based due to an issue the city was seeing regarding the amount of rainwater and groundwater that was entering the city’s sewer system that were causing sewer back-ups, property damage and health/safety issues.

It was something that came to the forefront again this summer after the area was blanketed with heavy rains over the span of two days in June that caused some sewer system back-ups as well as property damage to some homes.