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Exploring Pipe Condition Assessment and Trenchless Technologies with Paul Pasko
In this episode Marc and guest co-host Deb Heiser talk to Paul Pasko from Electro Scan, Inc. Paul talks about using new technologies to assess the condition of water and sewer pipes. We also talk about using trenchless techniques to rehabilitate pipes and how the future of pipe replacement will be finding small segments to replace/rehabilitate versus replacing the entire length of the pipe.
This is an entertaining episode where Paul shares several stories of his experiences and travels around the world.
Show notes:
https://www.electroscan.com/
Products referenced:
Swordfish Lead and Leak Detection
https://www.electroscan.com/products/swordfish/
ES-620 Probe
https://www.electroscan.com/products/es-620/
Pica Pipe Assessment Tools
https://www.picacorp.com/Technology/Inspection-Technology
Welcome to the Public Works Nerds podcast. Welcome to the Public Works Nerds podcast. I'm Mark Culver and today we have a special guest co-host. Hi Deb, hey Mark.
Marc Culver:Before we jump into today's episode, I just want to update everyone that our co-host, the co-founder of this great Public Works Nerds podcast, has decided to step aside. He's going to take some time, he's going to pursue some other interests. So we are saying goodbye to Mr Spack and we're going to go with some guests, co-hosts for a little while and see how that works and see what we want to do long term. But for now we're going to bring in great people like Deb. But before that I just want to you know, really I want to thank Mike for his contributions to this podcast and really, most importantly, for helping me get this podcast kicked off, because if it wasn't for Mike, if it wasn't for the conversations that he had with me and some other people here at Bolton and Menk, this wouldn't have happened. Certainly it wouldn't have happened when it happened. So I really am grateful to Mike for that and hope that he continues to listen and maybe we can bring him back in as another, as a guest for another topic, because Mike does know a lot of stuff about traffic. He's got a great background on that.
Marc Culver:So we'll see. We'll see what the future holds on that, but for now, for the rest of season, like I said, we're just going to. We're going to. You know I might go solo, but really I like having a co-host. So we're going to try out some guest co-hosts and see how that goes To finish off the first season. I don't know what a season in the podcast world is, but I kind of have it wrapped in my mind. That's at least 20 episodes. So we're going to finish up our 20 episodes with some co-hosts and see how that works. And this week that co-host, our excellent co-host, someone that our Public Works nerds are familiar with. A few weeks ago she did a great episode on street reconstruction and data collection for that and so that's Deb Heiser. So welcome Deb.
Deb Heiser:Thank you, mark, for that kind introduction. I have some pretty big shoes to fill today and again I just like to say Mike is an excellent person and I seriously hope he's listening right now and I appreciate your support during my podcast. This is my very first time doing a podcast and I have some big shoes to fill to try to emulate or to follow up Mike in this kind of co-host.
Marc Culver:I'm sure you'll do great. So let's jump in back to the episode, and today we're talking to Paul Pasko, somebody that Deb and I have known for quite a while, been very, very active in this area for a long time and now taking his show on the road internationally. But Paul is the vice president of international business development at ElectroScan. Paul's a professional civil engineer whom for the last 35 years has practiced consulting municipal engineering, primarily in the Minnesota area. Right.
Paul Pasko:Started off down in Illinois, oh, okay, yeah. And then, once I moved up here, it's been the Dakotas, iowa, minnesota, wisconsin, michigan, maine. Took me out to Maine.
Marc Culver:So I've been around. He's been around. He's more so than I was even aware, but really, during the last 18 years, paul's become an internationally known expert in pipe condition assessment for gravity, sewer and pressure pipes, and then also an expert applying trenchless technologies to rehabilitate those riskiest of pipes, using techniques like lining, directional drilling, pipe bursting and other techniques, and he's also award-winning. We love to bring in award-winning guests and Paul has won I'm sure you've won numerous awards, but one of the more notable ones is in 2019, he won the APWA Professional Manager of the Year Award in the Engineering and Technology category. So congratulations on that, thank you.
Deb Heiser:And when you look at 35,000 members of APWA, I mean that's an honor, it just shows you're excellent.
Paul Pasko:It was a lean walk across that stage. Don't trip, don't trip, don't trip.
Marc Culver:Where was that that you accepted that that was Seattle. That was Seattle in 19. The last conference before COVID? Yeah. The last conference before COVID? Yeah, so why don't you take it from your ball? Why don't you talk about your current adventure, what you're working on right now, what Electroscan is and the technology behind that? Sure.
Paul Pasko:So Electroscan is based in Sacramento, california. We have offices in Sydney, australia, sacramento, about an hour northwest of London, a place called Swindon, several other offices that are escaping me right now. And what we do is we put a probe in a pipe. The probe is tethered, it's a multi-sensor tool, so you have the conductivity, which is the low voltage to start of the show, but then, depending on the tool, you might also have CCTV, you might also have acoustics in their belt and suspenders to the conductivity tool. The conductivity runs at 11 volts of power, provided that probe is in water inside the pipe, the voltage will make its way across that fluid to the all the pipe walls, this tight pattern almost like a pizza tray, going down the inside of the pipe. And when it hits that pipe wall, if the pipe wall is a resistor plastic, clay, lined metal and if there's a defect in that pipe wall, the voltage is going to turn into electricity and come back to a grounding stake near our truck or whatever our rig may be. And that volt, that current, is measured, the amount, and based on what the measurement is, we can estimate the size of the defect. I keep calling them defects because not all defects are leakers right. And then, because we're connected with a tether with a very expensive odometer around the drum, we know exactly where that is. Our tethers could be up to a kilometer long. Oh wow, they could be as short as 100 meters long.
Paul Pasko:English units. I'm sorry, I was working with Malaysia this morning. I'm still in my SI mode.
Marc Culver:Well, hopefully our listeners in Australia will appreciate the meter reference.
Paul Pasko:Yeah, there will be a few listeners in Australia. Should we convert? I can almost I can't do that in my head now. I can almost guarantee Jerry Sinarho, down at Sydney Water will listen to this.
Paul Pasko:Here you go See, and if my proposals are actually accurate, right here, and then we have tools that go in pipes as small as a half inch that's our water service tools, and those can, using electricity, detect whether or not lead is present in a water service line. So our rigs are prepositioned around the world. We're a manufacturing company. Yes, we self-perform I'm out on a lot of job sites, self-performing inspections but primarily we want to sell tools. So we sell everything that we self-perform with. And it could be as simple as a tool on a hand truck, a hand cart that you can push around, put in the back of a rental car, very easy to put on an A380 to fly across the ocean all the way to truck mounted, which then those vehicles are typically prepositioned in place to go.
Paul Pasko:And what's fun about our tool is that and this is why I went to work for them when I retired was it's the only tool out there, in my opinion, that can tell a superintendent to within a couple of three backhoe bucket widths where to dig on the defect. So it's not going to be bringing back the dry holes, which is the frustration of a lot of the technologies that I used before I retired, because I've, you know, in that capacity that you were so kind to read. I've used virtually every tool under the sun sniffing dogs, the helium tracing, utilus, the satellite's whip and overhead, and this is the only one that gets you down to a couple of backhoe bucket widths. And when I pull the probe, when we pull the probe out of the pipe, the results are back within 10 minutes, which is something that you know isn't out there otherwise.
Paul Pasko:So I'm giving an example Arlington Water and Arlington Texas just bought a couple of our rigs and the reason they bought it is because Arlington Texas absorbs other communities that were smaller, less organized, into their network and they have a lot of systems that they don't know the condition thereof and they need something to go out and try and figure out. How do we start baselining our capital plan to absorb these networks into our system, watermate, and they love sending their technicians out there with the hand truck cart, the 100 meter tool. It's a push tool. They get back in 10 minutes, they have their PDF file, they have the data in their GIS system. Now, in a way, they go right in work orders or just, you know, putting it off for another day and assigning a cost to it in the future CIP. So that's kind of electro-scan in a nutshell, I think.
Deb Heiser:So take it from what your explanation is that actually the communities in the United States have purchased the technology and they're using it, or the staff is actually using it.
Paul Pasko:Yeah, in the United States. We have a couple of clients in Georgia that bought the Suri units and it's what's fun about the tool is it's plug and play. It's designed to go on Qs rigs so you can just take a QCCTV truck and plug this right into the system and use the tether that's on the CCTV truck, you know, to help operate our equipment right. And so we've got a couple of sewer tools going in Georgia. We've got some in Texas, Emmy Simpson I don't know if you use Emmy Simpson at all at St Louis Park there, Predominant in the upper part of the United States for testing water meters and exercising valves and rebuilding valves, all those sorts of things.
Paul Pasko:Simpson now owns a Surrey unit, a swordfish that's our unit for water service pipes to detect lead. They own the Trident tool, which is the push tool for pressure pipe 100 meters long, and they've just taken ownership of their Delta rig, which is the pressure pipe rig with the one kilometer of tether on it, and they're going to be offering all of those services. As a matter of fact, I'm going down to Valparaiso, Indiana, on Tuesday to teach their staff how to prepare proposals to use the Delta rig, because it's that new to them and then they'll be out getting training in the field. We have an actual training facility built on a United States cold storage facilities firefighting loop that goes around their cold storage building so we can have people out to operate the tools that they have just bought in a live pipe with live flow, because none of our tools disrupt flow or pressure. It's meant to be used while the customer is still active.
Deb Heiser:How is the tool launched into the pipe? I mean a closed system with a water main. How is the tool launched?
Paul Pasko:Well, there's a fair amount of system. There's a fair amount of planning involved because, quite frankly, that's the scariest part of my job is, as I've been traveling the world. I don't want to bash any other owner, but the number of owners, pressure and flow models that are not accurate is stunning. You'll be told that you're connecting to 80 psi at two feet per second flow. You get out there and you realize you're at 185 and it's rolling at nine feet per second and you turn to the owner and say you told us it was going to be. Yeah, we'll start opening valves and throttling valves and opening hydrants and we'll get this figured out. You had it figured out.
Marc Culver:So there's clearly a maximum pressure flow rate that you can operate under.
Paul Pasko:Yeah, so we have a safety dump valve built into our launch tube. Long answer to a short question. We have a launch tube that bolts onto the smallest would be about a four inch opening in the pipe. So if a municipality wants to use this, typically if we're using the push tool 100 meter we're going to go in through your fire hydrant and let it take the bonnet off and the innards out and we'll push down through that hydrant and get in. It's much like a sore snake. You can twist the tether and get it to turn left right in the T and go full length if the pipe is clean enough, both left and right out of that hydrant.
Paul Pasko:If there isn't anything like that, I was out in Cleveland last November doing an inspection on a 36 inch welded to cast, riveted cast iron pipe cement mortar line from 1907 right downtown and there they put a weld out on the top of the pipe, a four inch weld out, and then they put a nipple on that four inch gate valve and then we bolt it onto the four inch gate valve, open the gate valve, push down from the 12 o'clock position and then started pushing. Same principle if you're going to use the 100 meter long tool or the one kilometer long tool to delta. We need a minimum, you know, four inch opening. I usually tell owners if you're going to build an opening for us we can get through four, but most of our competitors need six. So if you're going to spend the money, there's really no difference in cost between a four inch and six inch tap in my opinion. Right the labor and so get something that others can use as well, especially as the market. The rehab market is trending towards being able to work through six inch openings with some of their key way tools and things.
Paul Pasko:So yeah, that's how we get in and the tube itself that we bolt down it's about a meter tall, it's about three inches round bolts on with a series of different adapters depending on what we're adapting to.
Paul Pasko:I had no idea there were that many flanges out there in the world, so many different bolt patterns. Patronus may take the cake the Patronus oil refinery I was working at in terms of funny flanges, but anyway, you build the flange, you adapt to the base of our unit and you put that launch tube on. It's got a chlorination slash pressure cap in the top that cam locks on as the tether goes through it. There's a series of Deltran washers in there that resist up to 150 psi. Actually they'll resist higher. But we have an emergency dump built into that that if you get north of 150 crack it goes off and it's dumps water to protect the equipment inside the pipe. And the only thing we're protecting currently at 150 is the ceilings on the camera housing on some of our tools that have the CCTV. Those seals want to fail at about 150. We're always looking for seals that are better, but right now the underwater camera people tend to orbit around 150.
Marc Culver:150 is a pretty high pressure.
Paul Pasko:Us. There's a lot higher out there. I was working at Patronus three weeks ago, a place called Pangering Malaysia Boy, you're out there when you're in Pangering Malaysia, I believe and we're connected to their firefighting line. They fight fires with seawater. They have a big lift station built on the coast. Strange thing you go through the front gates. It was 40 minutes to get to our job site and I was told we were only about halfway across the refinery property at 40.
Paul Pasko:These are enormous properties and we're connected and we're inspecting with our Trident tool because, again, it's portable, it's easy to get in and out and it's this is crude, but I'm going to say it it's our gateway drug. You bring out your hand and you let them sample for 100 meters, right, and they love what they see. And then the other inclined to want to put in an order for a Delta, because who wants to do 100 meters at a time? When you're at Patronus, you want to go kilometers at a time, because they got a lot of pipe to look at. And we got in there and we're inspecting with the Trident, the 100 meter tool, and all of a sudden their SCADA system detected that oh, there must be a fire in that area. So they hit us with all their fire pumps. We went from 130 PSI to probably 300, 380 PSI in about a half a second. Wow, now we've got 60 Patronus people standing around because we're showing off.
Paul Pasko:Right, if you're going off our tool, crack goes, the pressure release and you hear ah. And people start running because these are office folks, right, they're not used to it. My coworker, john, and I are kneeling right there with our tool and it's like, no, we know what just happened, we're safe, let's keep going. We got a inspection and they came up to us and said well, you're done now, right, you broke your tool. We heard the crack. No, we're still good. The camera took a hit, you know. We know we ruptured the housing on the camera, but that's just a belt and suspender to the star of the show, which is the conductivity and the probe is fine. We're going to keep going, but you know it's so. The pressures out there are insane. I've been working with Swordfish in basements of houses in Massachusetts, suburbs of Boston, and they're at 130 PSI in the basements of houses. We pulled the meter off and you connect our launch tube to their half inch water service heading for the street and you measure 130.
Marc Culver:That water's got a hurt coming out of that shower head.
Paul Pasko:I'm pressure washing, I turned it into super intense and from I think it was Norwich mass that we were at and I said, dude, really. He says yeah. I says this, is there Some sort of PRV in this house? He says I don't know, we'd have to ask the owner. But imagine doing your wash, your wash machine connected to 130, or your water softener or whatever. So lots of strange stuff. Wow, that's amazing. So you, oh, and our sewers.
Deb Heiser:I know you go ahead.
Paul Pasko:Yeah, okay, our sewer rigs, those just go in through utility access structures in the street. So those you pop the downstream structure, pop the lid on the upstream structure as well. Park a Jetter truck at the downstream. We own our own Jetter. Typically we use the city's Jetter and they jet from the downstream to the upstream. We pull that Jetter off and it gets to the upstream. Attach our probe to that end with a funnel cone. We set all that back down in the invert of the pipe. We tell the jet truck operator turn on your water, just let the water pour out the end of the hose and it gets trapped by our funnel plug and we then tell them to pull with their winch on their hose, our probe and it stays embedded in that knuckle of water and now the voltage is going to make it to the pipe wall because we're carrying our own water with us.
Paul Pasko:If you have a surcharge pipe, so much to do at it, then I don't really even need the Jetter, other than for the fact that I need some way to propel my tool we talked about back to the pressure pipe to try it into the push the swordfish is a push, but then to delta the one kilometer long that's got a hydro shoot on it, so we get in there and then we ride the flow down, however far we're going to go. Yeah, it's fun to do. It can be a little nerve wracking. Like I said, owners no fault of theirs. Models are models, right. They're only so accurate and they get a lot of good data out of us to go back and calibrate the model. I, on the other hand, get less hair, it's more gray and my hands shake more. But that's all cool at the end of the day.
Deb Heiser:You've mentioned a couple of products, and so there's the Pride-Int, which is a tethered for pipe. You've mentioned swordfish.
Paul Pasko:Yep. So Pride-Int is a 100 meter push tool meant for pressure pipe, whether it's force main or water main or any kind of process piping, Although when she dip it in sewer it looks like yeah, you want to do that, you got to keep that, Then that becomes your force main tool. We strongly recommend you not go put it in your blue water van right.
Deb Heiser:That's a good thing to bring up. I mean, when you're doing a tethered tool in potable water disinfection, how do you make sure that the water stays?
Paul Pasko:clean, right, right. So in that case, we're working with whatever the city wants us to use. I'm shocked at the number of cities, no names, but Southern United States. Ah, don't worry about it, put it in. We chlorinate the s***, we chlorinate the. You've got that button over there. Yeah, we chlorinate the crap out of our water, so don't.
Marc Culver:Paul Pascoe, the first one to swear on our podcast. That's okay.
Deb Heiser:Another award to win Right.
Paul Pasko:It's an electric stand thing, that they don't care. I don't know if they don't care, if they truly do that much chlorination, but it sounds like that. Typically. I've found that the superintendent is also the police chief. Sometimes it's also the mayor, so it's different. Right and okay. That's one end of the extreme. But most communities give us their formula. Actually, they just bring out the jug of the chlorination solution already mixed and we stand on the side with a kiddie pool and we chlorinate the crap out of everything that's going in the launch tube and the launch tube itself. And then, once we get in the pipe and we're rolling, we've got that cap at the top of the launch tube that resists 150 psi or more in the case of Patronus, that is full of chlorine as well and that's a chlorine bath that wipes that tether as it goes through.
Deb Heiser:So, but then the swordfish. You brought up lead lines and I know that that's a topic that is hot topic right now in Minnesota A little bit. So the swordfish, more of a for a small diameter pipe or what's a, what's the?
Paul Pasko:difference. So swordfish is a push tool and it's mounted. If you looked at it you'd be like, wow, that's a Milwaukee sewer snake with a battery on it. Yeah, it is. At Electroscan we don't try and reinvent the wheel for getting in and getting out of a pipe. We borrow a lot of technology or buy a lot of technology from other companies to get us in and get us out of pipes. So in this case the basis of it is either a Milwaukee sewer snake or it's tools that electricians use to fish wires through walls. We find that they're nice and bendy and they can get through all of the tortuous route that is a water service pipe. So that tool is hand carried and it goes as small as half inch diameter pipe, depending on the level of tuberculation in there. So you push that into the pipe from the meter. Now the meter may be at the right-of-way line when we're in warmer climates. Here of course it's in basements. I want to add and just throw a shout out to St Paul Regional Water. When swordfish hit the market last July, st Paul Water volunteered four of their customers' houses for us. So the very first swordfish inspections happened via St Paul Regional Water, with Caitlin Larson over there.
Paul Pasko:So again, minnesota. For as far out of the way as we are internationally, I don't mean that in a bad way, but the number of people when I say I'm from Minnesota, where is that? They have no clue. Oh, we're up there in Canada, so you're right, by Montreal. No, no, go for the west. We're just south of Winnipeg, winni-what, yeah. So you just say, okay, imagine Seattle, imagine New York, yeah, yeah, yeah, go halfway across. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But for as out of the way as we are, I will give a lot of credit to Minnesota for taking shots at things first, for being the first adopters. There's a lot of risk takers up here and, quite frankly, that's what's needed, as the United States is a little bit behind, in my opinion as I travel a lot now in terms of trying new things and building market share for the different trenchless technologies and the new pipe condition assessments that are there.
Marc Culver:We are very risk adverse.
Paul Pasko:Not really that.
Marc Culver:you know that when it comes to utilities, I mean, I just mean the public work sector, and we are, yes, yes, yes we are.
Paul Pasko:We are, although, if you know, unless you're Mayor Mickey in that southern town and talked about that, and it's like that, and you know that that's true. That was the place, though, too, where we tried to get in through a fire hydrant, and they they installed the hydrant at the location of a repair that they had made to their water main and they put in a, a segment of PVC, and they decided they were gonna tap that, put the hydrant on. When we got down in there with the Trident tools, we get through the bottom of the hydrant, we're heading for the through the lateral to the main, and I'm looking at it on the camera. I'm like, what put? Am I looking at the? The hole through the side of the PVC they cut with a saw saw, and it was diamond shaped. So I'm looking at it.
Paul Pasko:I'm like I can't go in there. What do you mean? Well, I can get in it, but when I'm pulling back that, that, that diamond is gonna function as a, as a claw and claw hammer. I'm gonna get stuck. Well, well, you said you'd be able to get in. Yeah, but not through something like that. But you know, here's a clue next time, use a tapping machine. Let's not be, let's not be using chisels, sandpaper and sawsaws man. But you know, adapt and provides, overcome right.
Deb Heiser:How does it use GPS, tell the technology to identify where the what do we call it distress defects are defect defect.
Paul Pasko:So, no, it's got that high end odometer Okay. So that tells us how far away we are from the launch tube and that tells us now it's working. In a suburb of Kuala Lumpur last month, tracing water mains Are inspecting water mains and it turned out that their construction plans weren't very good and in that case it's is HDP e-water main down there. They love HDP e and they're only, you know, six inches a berry, because there's no frost ever in Kuala Lumpur. They're three degrees north latitude, right, so they're very easy to trace our, our probes using your regular sands. I can't remember what, at what, how many megahertz. He said it, maybe it's 512 or something like that, but then you can trace where you are in the ground.
Paul Pasko:So we've had numerous clients around the world ask us to come out and find their water mains, because right away management is not a thing, especially in South America. Yeah, we've also had a lot of interest out of South America in finding water services, why? Well, because there's so much illegal connection down there and in some places They've asked us to work. They would have to provide us like military escort, because the people that illegally tapped Probably are doing things with the water that they don't want them to know that they're doing with it and they certainly don't want to meet her on it, because you can't bill a cartel right. So there's a lot of there, you know, and those jobs we've been pretty hesitant about taking because, well, you don't want to get shot at doing no that's where you train somebody to do it right the local representative talk about the front lines of public works?
Paul Pasko:Yeah, well, it's just strange and sadly I think it's the story that's coming here the amount of stolen water Actually, I have seen it in the south, where they they don't directly ask us to go out and find lost water services with the CCTV, but yeah, you know that's what they're doing and you're starting to see a lot of people illegally tap and the taps look fantastic, by the way, because I thought it would be Drill it put a straw in there with duct tape and tape it up. No, these are professionally done. And I said, well, how do these folks pay for this? Oh, auto parts produce Livestock. You know there's a lot of bartering that goes on to get these illegal connections in, but they want to meter because of the amount of water that, say, the city of Recife in Brazil loses is just unbelievable. But you know it's a. It's something that that I think is just gonna get worse as time goes on and people get more desperate for water. We don't have that problem here. It's fantastic to be up right, not yet anyway.
Marc Culver:But it's like anything, it, once it reaches, reaches a certain price, then right and it'll be.
Paul Pasko:Right, but swordfish is a it's a fun one. You know pipes down to half inch diameter and how that works is that, rather than having you know reading particular Milliamperes of power? Returning to our grounding stake and in many cases the grounding stick, we just attach our grounding clamp to the houses water service because in cold weather climates, nine times out of ten that's the ground for the house, right? We're measuring the percent of the 11 volts. Coming back to our grounding stake and that percentage, there's very good. You know distinct break offs for the different pipes in terms of how much voltage will escape. So, like your plastics, maybe only 10% of the voltage makes it back your coppers or, I'm sorry, your leads. 40 to 55% of the voltage makes it back your galvanized. You're up in the 70s, maybe 80s, and then your coppers, you're up 95, 100% back. So as the probe gets pushed into the pipe by the technician, the technician, there's a readout right on the handle of the Milwaukee I think I saw you had the picture of it up and the the technician is seeing what percent and they know how far they've gone because there's a little walk wheel as you're pushing the tether in and Then there's also a tablet, much like you've got there in front of you. That's Bluetooth connected, so you're seeing a plot of the milliamp, years of coming back, the percentage of the 11 volts coming back on the y-axis and the x-axis has the distance You've traveled into the pipe, or the time stamp, and a lot of the owners are like, why the time stamp?
Paul Pasko:Well, your water service is if we follow a straight line. You know, but I work in the Milwaukee Metro. They were paid by the linear foot back in the early 1900s to put in the water service line. So what do they do? They go down through the floor, they get under the spread footing and the plummeted two or three victory laps and then headed for the street because then they could turn in that they put in 150 feet on a distance that should have only been 35 or 40. Well, and so distance doesn't really mean anything in a lot of parts of the world, whereas time stamp that you've been in the pipe and pushing for that long, that does mean something, because it shouldn't take you that long to push 30 feet. You know, you know, you know you're into something where there's something strange down there.
Marc Culver:Hmm.
Paul Pasko:Yeah, and you don't want to find it when you bring in the corbusy unit or something to grab on to that lead and use it as the pole chain to try and pull it out of the ground, because what's gonna happen to that coil is gonna pull tight and you're trying to pull a knot from out under the foundation. So it's good to know those things because that might be one where you're doing a some sort of a pilot augerboard to get a new water service to that house that isn't led and In same thing the results are back. You know if you all of our stuff our tablets are trident or Delta. They're all linked by Wi-Fi up to our app that Processes the data in the less than 10 minutes that's all up on Amazon web service. So, provided we have good Wi-Fi connection in the basement, that data is gonna be back to the operator within 10 minutes as well. So if the crew that's replacing lead is right behind us, they can turn around and say, yeah, this one's got lead, get after this one.
Marc Culver:Hey everyone, I just want to take a quick moment to thank our sponsor, bolton Mink, who is producing and editing our podcast.
Bolton & Menk:At Bolton Mink, we believe all people should live in a safe, sustainable and beautiful community. We promise every client two things We'll work hard for you and we'll do a good job. We take a personal interest in the work being done around us and, at the end of the day, we're real people offering real solutions.
Marc Culver:So from an application perspective, obviously this is really helpful and very pertinent and timely right now as we talk about lead services and and and documenting. You know the lead services, like, like all agencies, are required to do now Yep, and eventually replace them. But outside of that and and obviously it's good for finding those defects, to leaks, yep and such. But you know, as we think about and so many of our topics come back to asset management and such but as we think about that, is this helpful in for a public agency to kind of Determine the condition of their pipes outside of an active leak.
Paul Pasko:Yeah, let me give you an example. I'll go back to Arlington, texas, they, where they had a six inches best of cement water main along the side of a road and it was about 1400 feet long. And the county showed up and said they're going to resurface that road this fall of 2023 and get your pipe fixed. And Arlington water said well, we don't. We know we've got an issue at somewhere along the line, but we don't think we need to get rid of the whole pipe. And they wanted to be careful with that decision. They didn't have money programmed to do 1400 feet of pipe bursting. They usually do pipe bursting and your pipe bursting asbestos now right. So that raises another issue. So they would prefer not to dip into that. So they said bring that trident out here, let's see how we go. So they didn't have enough fire hydrants along this particular stretch of road anyway. So they put in four insertion points and they installed the T and just spun it straight up to 12 o'clock position so we could bolt on easy right. So we got in. We inspected both ways and we found three distinct defects along that they could fix with segmental repairs or outside pipe repairs and then, okay, county, come on in. So they avoided having to spend the money on a pipe bursting job that wasn't needed in the first place.
Paul Pasko:And they had one section of the pipe went underneath a creek and they had no idea. Did it offset into the road and pass over the top of the culvert? Did it go under the creek? Did it go this way? The plans were from 19,. Whatever, they were just a ballpoint pen line on a piece of paper. It wasn't even a scale. And because they could trace it in as best as cement and their depth of area is substantially lesser than ours, the CCTV because I didn't mention this, Triton's his self leveling, so 12 o'clock is always up, and because we're in a water main, visibility was good. We came up on that spot where it goes under the creek and you saw the deflection down, without a fitting of course, and then the deflection back to horizontal, then back up and then back to horizontal. So now they knew exactly how it was and they're out there with their locator and they're locating us as we went. So then they stuck a flag GPS comes out later that afternoon and beeps to flags and added they did.
Marc Culver:Can you also get depth out of it then too?
Paul Pasko:I think they can. We typically don't, but they interpret. I saw the guys in Kuala Lumpur water company there is named Ircellingore. They were playing around with depth and I think it had to do with the strength of the signal. Now they know their foundation soils down there pretty well and the foundation soil, surprisingly, around Kuala Lumpur are remarkably consistent. I thought in tropical climates they were really varied. Like us, they really weren't, which was a surprise.
Paul Pasko:So, and then some other things, I was working, so Caleb Peterson up at Cloquet has had us out. We use the Delta rig in a 36 inch precast concrete cylinder pipe that conveys Lake Superior water from just offshore, superior 22 miles, to the SAPI paper plant in Cloquet. Wow, and they're always. It's an interesting arrangement up there in that I believe the city owns the pipe and SAPI leases it for use, but the city is on the hook for maintaining. So they were trying to find a leak. There was a wet spot that appeared in a gravel road, tested the water, it was chlorine, so they knew it was theirs and we went out. And we went through an air release, an existing air release, six inch air release. They took the release valve off, exposing the valve bolted onto that, launched into the pipe on inspection day. They had six feet per second for us.
Paul Pasko:So grab that flow chute and there we were, 2400, 2500 feet out, and I'm watching how fast the tethers heading into the pipe. And any idiot can get in a pipe and it's you gotta get out with your data. That's the trick, right? And I'm always don't wanna be that idiot, right? That can't get out of the pipe and we blow the chute.
Paul Pasko:The chute doesn't float away, it stays with it, zip tied to the probe, and we start pulling back. And we would test every now and again to see how much drag we got here, cause there's a winch on our drum to help us pull back, but you have that much water going that fast, that's drag all along your tether. And then that pipe was offsetting itself vertically and horizontally as we went. So we could have probably gone the entire 3,280 feet, but we gotta come home. So we made it out far enough and then we ended the inspection and pulled back. And even when, if we do go out that to the end of ours, we never really go to the end. It's like fighting a fish on a fishing pole you never let all the line off your reel, right, so you always wanna have a couple of turns on there for the retrieve, but yeah, so gosh, I forgot your question.
Marc Culver:No, just talking about like condition ratings and that, but you were using that as an example of finding that defect. So what are the-.
Paul Pasko:And in the case of Cloquet, we saw the defect. It was only about a quarter of a gallon a minute, but it's shown through as a defect. And in that situation I believe Cloquet ended up taking out a couple of three sticks and replacing them with ductile iron Because once they dug down they saw the pipe was punky on the outside for a little distance either way from the joint that was to show.
Marc Culver:So if it's not in there's not even a minor act of leak you're not going to you-.
Paul Pasko:Oh no, we'll find. So what other defects do you find? Oh, this was a good one. We're working in Tucson, arizona, and this was coming out of COVID and this was about the time that public workers were pushing back against coming. There was going to be some shift in policy down there, so they were going to go on strike. So we're trying to get the inspection done before they leave, because we need public works to support us.
Paul Pasko:Right To operate the valves. I'm not going to touch anybody's valve. I'm not going to touch anybody's hydrant. So where you get inside the pipe, this was an eight-inch asbestos cement water main and it was underneath interstate five maybe, and they wanted to know if the pipe had been damaged by recent bridge reconstruction. So we're in there and we found that, yeah, there was a pile that got punched through, and I don't think ADOT admitted that they did it, but we plan to stay.
Paul Pasko:You know you're in the pipe and you're washing your current coming back and there's a consistent signal and all of a sudden it dumped, and it dumped for a distance of 20 feet and it came back up. Well, what's 20 feet long, stick a pipe. So when we went back and looked at the CCTV. Up there it is. There's a 20-foot long piece of plastic. So I know they were going to go talk to ADOT about, hey, what happened with this bridge and were there any other things that you didn't tell us?
Paul Pasko:Then we kept on going down the way and we began to notice that there was pipe wall loss because all of a sudden, more electricity is getting through the pipe wall for a continuous stretch, more than we would expect to see. Why is that? Well, there's less of a resistor. Why is there less of a resistor? You've lost pipe wall material so you can see stretches of where you started to lose pipe wall. Now there weren't active leaks going on there, but they're losing wall right, and whenever I see a spot like that I'm asking the utilities when they do replace if they ever replace that they give me a coupon or that pipe that I could send it to the lab and do the micrometer ring of the pipe wall and some microscopic analysis and figure out. So I can start plotting the comparison of the electro-scan data against what's actually in the field and come up with a coefficient of determination on things like pipe wall loss.
Marc Culver:Right, so you can see some trends in that.
Paul Pasko:Right. And then, in the case of Tucson, all of a sudden we're seeing a spike every eight feet. It's like, well, what's all? The sticks of pipe are eight feet long in this clay, in this asbestos cement that they bought. And what happened to? The superintendent turned to me and he says oh crap, this is the pipe that we were buying from Mexico in the late fifties. Sometimes they shipped the gaskets with it, sometimes they didn't. When they didn't, the plumbers wants to get paid by the linear foot, so they're just gonna put it in without the gaskets. Oh, so we were seeing every joint and it wasn't leaking, it was just a small defect. But if they dug down to look they probably wouldn't even see water at the joint. But we proved that, yeah, every joint didn't have its gasket, so they didn't have any major leakers on that pipe. Small defects. They decided what we'll do is program out maybe 15, 20 years for a CIPP water main lining. They can lose the ID and they like CIPP water main lining down there. So there's another example of the condition assessment.
Paul Pasko:But relative to where does the tool fall in the pecking order? You know, most municipalities I dealt with start with a desktop model based on the data that they have in the drawer, right, right, age of the pipe, age of the pipe, material and breakage Calculator, risk score doesn't service Softness with the failure. Right, right, yep, likelihood and consequence. You got it. And then on the riskiest pipes generally and medium risk generally, that's where they'll start going out and asking us to inspect or xylem or echologics or whomever, to get that next level of data. So it's a graduated approach.
Paul Pasko:Now if you're in the United Kingdom, our guys in the UK on sewers they're scanning everything. They don't bother as near as I could tell, with a desktop analysis to start with. It's just get the probe in the pipe and find every defect in that run of sewer and that entire county and get it up there so that we can go through with our consultant and start deciding which pieces of pipe are coming out. Ireland is much the same way. I get to go to Belfast coming up. I'm gonna be working for Belfast Water, it looks like. So yeah, it runs the gamut, but that is how it's plugged in Usually. The desktop analysis goes first and as they start to drill down, that's when they start to take a look at individual parts of their pipe, smaller communities where they have no records, they have nothing. They'll have us come in and scan everything and we become the baseline inspection for them. A lot of our private clients are the same way.
Paul Pasko:The conductivity is very repeatable, right? So you get in a pipe and if I scan it today, like my paper company clients out in May, we'll scan it today, we'll see what the defects are. They'll have us back in five years take another look at it. Did anything get worse? Because there they do manage by the pipe segment, they don't manage by the shot of pipe.
Paul Pasko:The star of the show is the paper machine.
Paul Pasko:That's what makes all the money, right, they don't wanna put the money in the support infrastructure, they try and get it in the paper machines. So they literally will take advantage of every trenchless tool under the sun to do individual repairs when the plant is down, maybe once every 10 years. So they invite us back and I'm seeing people now plotting deterioration curves for individual pipe joints, where the x-axis is the year, the y-axis is the amount of milliampere's of power that came out of that defect, and they'll plot and then as that degrades, just like pavement management, they have some threshold that they send to the people in South Africa, I guess. And they say, yeah, apply some money. So they apply some money, they lower the amount of milliampere's now because they've done some sort of repair, and then they start over and they do it again. Interesting, yeah. So as more and more Trenchless technology tools come on to the market in the US, I think you're going to see more and more people on their riskiest pipes, managed by the pipe stick.
Marc Culver:Well, and let's segue into that, then, you know, let's tap into your expertise and your knowledge about those trenchless technologies.
Paul Pasko:I can't thank you enough for letting me talk like this. I mean, I love teaching. My job is predominately teaching now right, teaching it in the field. I'm living the dream. I don't have a time card. I have an expense report, I'm the owner, chuck Hanson, who's probably going to be listening to this, but I don't have a utilization rate, you know. So I wander the world as a nomad. My office is that briefcase on the floor, and to be able to come in and talk about some of the things I've seen, I can't thank you enough. I'm having a great time.
Marc Culver:No, this is good. These stories are great.
Paul Pasko:Oh, I'm just nicking the surface.
Paul Pasko:I know we could go on for three hours for sure you want to hear we're doing a condition assessment on a pipe on Manly Beach in Australia. It's really nice. It's about an hour. You know we're manly. Oh, I've been to Manly Beach, all right. Well, did you walk the Batuminous Causeway from the there's? Shelly Beach is connected to the Manly Docks with the Batuminous Causeway. What you probably didn't know is there is a 15 inch force main that runs right underneath that causeway. That's why the causeway is there.
Paul Pasko:So I'm out there doing our mission setup and I'm turning around and I'm looking at the coral sea. It was the prettiest job site I have ever been on and you may have noticed when you walked the Deb, all the swimmers. That is a huge training ground for your long distance. Open water swim people, and Michelle and I are those people, right, we love doing that stuff. So they were getting complaints from some of the swimmers that there was some sewage in their nasal. You know that they could smell it. That's not good and I'm like well, we have a sewer here. So we've been working at Manly Beach, you know. So, anyway, I could go on for hours, but yeah, it's segue please.
Deb Heiser:So I was gonna tease him about. Is he retired in traveling the world?
Paul Pasko:Yeah, well yeah, and you know, deb, what a great way to combine. No, I don't want to brag, but I'm going to okay. So working down in Malaysia right For the month of June, and generally when I go overseas I'm gone for a month at a time, kind of thing, but we get a break in the action for a weekend. So because we're on the US dollar and they're on the ring, it's take every cost and divide by 4.6.
Paul Pasko:So we grabbed the flight out to Borneo and we went to the far east end of Borneo for the weekend and snorkeled on the South Celebes Sea, I think is where we were, and the visibility was like 200 feet. And we're off this island called Sipadan and we got in a school at Jackfish, and Jackfish I guess they're about the size of a tuna. I'm from Minnesota, I don't know what tuna sizes are, but you get in the middle of these schools and they swirl around you. So I'm snorkeling in the middle of a fish tornado and I'm like, wow, this is just a weekend and then back to work on Tuesday. That's pretty cool. Anyway, I didn't want to.
Paul Pasko:All right but I know Sorry.
Deb Heiser:So getting back to nerding out.
Marc Culver:So let's just spend a few minutes at least nerding out about. We keep talking about trenchless technologies and what do we do when we do find the defect and without replacing the whole pipe and everything and without tearing up the whole road. Talk about kind of the evolution of trenchless technologies. And I think probably the first thing that cities felt really comfortable doing was was directional bore, and then we got more confidence in some other technologies and other techniques, and so maybe talk a little bit about that evolution and what we're doing today. And you already referenced pipe bursting, but when I came to Roseville and we did our first pipe bursting thing, I thought that was the coolest thing in the world. That still is, yeah.
Paul Pasko:Yeah.
Marc Culver:It's all. But yeah, just kind of talk about that evolution. Starting with, we're not going to replace this whole pipe, sure.
Paul Pasko:Evolution. Let me begin with the end in mind. So in this role as VP International for Electroscan, I get to go to some incredible shows around the world because we present there and we exhibit there. I was at one in Munich, germany, a year ago Can't think of its name now It'll come to me and I was like a kid in a candy store, going around and looking at all of the things coming our way, because Europe typically is the first adopter, along with the Middle East, and then it starts working its way to Canada and then into us and I can tell you that there's a lot of perfecting the mousetraps out there.
Paul Pasko:People are getting smaller in terms of inspection tools to get in pipes like swordfish, and people are getting bigger, meaning they can directional drill far bigger pipes. They can pipe burst far bigger pipes. They can line far bigger pipes. There are units out there that will scrub the styrenes out of the air as you're venting out of a manhole for a CIPP lining job. There are new curing rigs, the advances in UV technology for lining. The Germans are doing great work on that. Of course they are.
Deb Heiser:Yeah, what is it coming to Minnesota?
Paul Pasko:Well, that's the thing and there's the other part about beginning with the end in mind. Sadly, in the upper Midwest I'm not just going to pick on Minnesota this engineer has seen a reluctance to embrace the tools and because, whatever the reasons for the reluctance, contractors don't want to go out and lease or purchase this equipment. It's very expensive. So unless there's market share to do it, which is driven by the St Louis parks of the world and you guys are first adopters. So I'm not picking on SLP in any way. But until there's more people that are willing to take the risk which isn't a risk anymore, quite frankly, these are proven technologies and spend a little bit more money the first time to gain the understanding of how the tool works, we're not going to see the contractors up here.
Paul Pasko:And we were talking before the podcast began that I believe St Louis Park has moved away from structural waterman lining and has gone to pipe bursting. And you're not the only ones. My friend Jeff Shonek down in Omaha. As a public utility they've moved away from CIPP lining and water mains as well to pipe bursting because of price. They love the lining, they love that they don't have to dig up every water service to reconnect like you have to do with pipe bursting Much cleaner, much faster. But boy, they just can't justify the additional expense in their CIP.
Marc Culver:So do you think is that cost difference because we're not doing enough water main lining here? Yes, so if we got more and more agencies to do it, that cost would come down.
Paul Pasko:If you did more water main lining, if you did more ultraviolet cure lining of sanitary sewers or storm sewers fantastic tool when you're in an area. Before I retired we lined sanitary sewer along Medicine Lake out by Plymouth. Here the sewers were in the backyards. As I recall, there was no easement or the easements were forgotten to be deeded back when the it happens, hey, could be worse. South America, they don't worry about that. Put the pipe in variant and put the house over the top of it. Yikes, yeah. Yeah, that's stunning what I see. But in that situation you couldn't get a steam rig out there. You're going to rut the yards If you could get to the backyards, because where do you put it? You put it in the backyards for those old resort communities, not putting it in the street. The lowest spot is the walkouts to the lake right. So that's where you're going to bury it and that's where they put it back in the 70s. So there, we used ultraviolet cure because they were able to put it in wagons and drag it back using pull wagons, radio flyer wagons to get back to work through the manhole. But as far as I know, jc Dillon out of Illinois, chris Dillon's company, he's still one of the few that's doing it and does it really really well. Chris has been up here aligning things for city of Wysata. I think he's done a few pipes under the railroad tracks with Jen Schuman over there. But there needs to be more demand, and the more demand is what's going to drive these tools into here.
Paul Pasko:You go around Europe, kuala Lumpur too. Driving in KL in Kuala Lumpur is an incredible experience if you ever get a chance. But because it's so crazy busy there, 24 seven, virtually everything is down trenchless. They really don't dig down there. They can't shut a road down. They can't shut it down. They can't shut it down and then turn a valve. They don't know what is connected to what. So all of a sudden, you take down Patronus Tower? I don't think so. So the emphasis on trenchless and the number of contractors that they have they've got a plethora and it's on par with digging. It beats digging.
Paul Pasko:Now some of what I'm saying. If contractors are listening, I'm sure they're going to put an X on my LinkedIn page. But the days of digging replace whether you want to admit it today or not are coming to a close. It's so much less of a carbon footprint to do it and that's a big deal In Malaysia. I was talking with a guy from Ireland off the coast that the island isn't there anymore, it's underwater. These are very real issues to people in other spots, not us. Yet we're very fortunate being 960 above sea level here. But jeez oh man. So the benefits, the less disruption to the population at that triple bottom line economic, social, environmental, environmental. Good, it checks every box. But we need more contractors, and that's true on the pipe condition assessment side too.
Marc Culver:Yeah, and that's a big common thing that I hear is we just need better tools eventually more available, more accessible and hopefully cheaper to help us assess these pipes that you can't see, and I caution so many clients.
Paul Pasko:Boy, there's a lot of algorithms that are being sold right now that, hey, give us your data, we'll wash it through and we'll give you a back at desktop analysis of your risk scores on your pipes, the amount of garbage in, garbage out. You know, what they don't tell you is that hey, for an additional fee, will scrub your data. So therefore, you get a lot of PVC pipe that was installed in 1903. I don't think so, but excuse your scores like you wouldn't believe. And and then if, if, if, if they, if they were to give you that Price to scrub, well, they wouldn't get the work to scrub the data.
Paul Pasko:So they're giving you competitive prices that don't scrub the data and it's like well, st Louis Park has their big person pants on. They should know what they're buying. Well, no, they don't, because you're not being honest with them. Come on, people, that's not how you do business, that's not how BMI does business. You'd be honest, right, but a lot of people don't do that. So there's a lot of garbage in and garbage out on the market right now.
Deb Heiser:Let me kind of build on this conversation of you know doing the risk analysis versus actual physical inspection. St Louis Park recently did a pilot project where he used a free swimming yeah, baby, yeah, pika. We used other seasnakes. Hold my beer and watch this. Very, there's 150 psi on that sucker. Nope, I'm very good tool but and it was a pilot for us as a first time, it's called sea snake and pika is the company that that has to the other Canada. Yeah, and this is the first time in the Midwest that that's been used where we the results are Awesome. I mean, we were looking at pipe wall thickness loss of where there's only like four or five percent left in some of these areas when we weren't planning on replacing the water mate. Yep, so how do you? But when I talk about with my colleagues, why are you putting the money in Investigating? You should just be putting it into replacing, right, talk about that.
Paul Pasko:Do you just go out and replace your streets or do you have a payment management plan? We have a payment management. Why don't you have a pipe management plan? And that's where the world is moving to. When I go into developing parts of the world, payment management is a foreign concept to them, as is pipe management, but that's.
Paul Pasko:The answer is that at the end of the day, you need to stand in front of the city manager and explain why you need the money and you, you can start with the desktop, understanding that you're going to have to drill down.
Paul Pasko:You cannot rely exclusively on the desktop. But at the end of the day, you only have so many dollars and you spend the dollars in the right spot, so that then the parks department has the money to go and build the ice sheet behind the second outdoor ice sheet, you know, behind the rec center, because I know you already have one beautiful one. But for those reasons, money there, there isn't more money out there, unless you're a refinery, then they, you know, pull down more money than God, right, but there isn't more money. That's why you do it. That that's why you guys are ahead of the curve, is because you're looking and deciding, and I would argue that probably in the Next ten years Deb Heiser is probably going to be managing and doing three sticks pipe rather than from hydrogen to hydrogen, because you'll be confident enough, or your Superintendent of water or sewer will be confident enough in the results to say only those three sticks between those two manholes, so the access structures, only those two sticks a pipe between those two crosses in the water main.
Marc Culver:Yeah, I think really what the point that we have to get to and we need to do this sooner, rather the later is a lot of agencies own their own Camera system for their sanitary sewer system. So they do, and and maybe their storm sewer system, but primarily the sanitary sewer system, and we're very we've been very good, we've been very conditioned about televising or sanitary sewers on a regular basis, jetting them, blah, blah, blah, but we know the condition of our sanitary sewers and then we've been lining them or whatever. We need to get at that same point with our water mains and, and we also need to get the same point with our storm sewer system. And so now that means that these agencies need to buy the equipment and they need to get trained, they need to get comfortable on how to use this equipment so that they can do these assessments, same thing that they're doing with the televised.
Paul Pasko:Yeah, I mentioned that city in Georgia. I believe it's the city educator Georgia, yeah, went out and bought their own sewer rig, just like they have a CCTV rig. Now they have a electro scan ES 620 unit. I think that they go out and do it on themselves Our LinkedIn Texas with their trident. They're gonna go out and do it themselves and they're gonna go out and do it for other communities as well. I think there's agreements in the cities like that too, where some communities share at the CCTV truck. Well, they're gonna share that trident tool, right, and you know you bring up pica, love that tool, inspect it many times, have used it and smart balls many times. One of the risks with them. In a city in Texas just discovered this to get it in, you got to turn the water off right, or maybe in your case, you shot it through their torpedo tube.
Deb Heiser:If you yeah, we launched it. We did a launch. It was a 12 inch pipe. That we're okay, so you're able to shoot in yeah.
Paul Pasko:In many cases you have to turn the water off, to set the device in and then let it go. And boy, turn in water off and turn in it on, especially, and I attribute this to the number of retirements in public works. There's a lot of younger people that don't have the experience of the folks that walked out the door right. So, turning water off gently, turning it back on gently, while on this particular city didn't quite understand they cracked their pipe seven times Along a major arterial that's a bypass around the, the Metroplex down there, so you know and and then it's free swimming right.
Paul Pasko:And and the number of when I work with Bell fast water Dublin, dublin, ireland, when I'm in Dublin, while we have a lot of smart balls floating around down here we're not really sure where, but we've got a bunch of them in our system. Oh, no, nothing, nothing, nothing bad against smart. No, I mean, I've used them I. I use them a lot personally and there is a time and a place for every one of these tools and you know. But to have that tether on it, to get it back and to be able to launch live without having to turn that water off, you know things that communities stop and need to think about as you get into that aspect of drilling down off your desktop so we are Getting to the end of this podcast.
Marc Culver:This has been great and, like I said, I think we could probably go for another two hours.
Paul Pasko:You know your stories, but you know the smart cities initiated it's. You know that. I know you're part of.
Marc Culver:You know, didn't even let me ask the question, paul, you're just like well, right into the air, listen to the podcast.
Deb Heiser:Come on, he's listening to the podcast, so yeah so talk about what's coming.
Paul Pasko:I've been, I've been fortunate enough to, you know, do these things. It's a time and a time and truly to me, it is a conversation. Yeah, as you can tell, I'm kind of getting a kick out of the down. Oh, it's good so. So when I look at smart cities and you see it is things like that, that is the direction that this is moving.
Paul Pasko:Okay, so when, when you go to Europe and and you see they don't always call it that, right, but it's carrying those Concentrations and and and there isn't enough of that and and, quite frankly, that's the, the magazines, the newspaper article, not newspaper articles, but in our trade journals, yeah, yeah, awwa, reporter eight APW, a stink when, yes, there's some elevation that are that's raised that way, but it's more through Things like this, things that Tony's mixing over there, that that that the word has to get out, because if you don't hit people With the message in easy to share, understandable discussions, we're never gonna get there right and overseas. They've started these discussions 25, 30 years ago and and that's why it's second hat to them.
Marc Culver:If you, I think, I think I need to go overseas and start learning about I need to go to me.
Paul Pasko:Yeah, we need well again, not right next not not need a co-host.
Marc Culver:But yeah, I need to go to Germany and see all the technology they're using over there and bring it back Not to correct.
Paul Pasko:But I'm just, yes, I'm presenting a paper at the no dig down under show in Sydney last June and I'm out on the fan tale of the boat in Sydney Harbor for their dinner cruise and I'm like, well, this doesn't suck, this is yeah, this is pretty cool. Yeah, and I'm talking to a guy and it turns out we know the same guy in the Vancouver office of Should I say their name better at, but anyway, the, the, the firm. Then we're like, hey, you know you like working at electric scan and Chuck, I'm gonna tell the story on the radio. But I says, yeah, I like it there.
Paul Pasko:And they saw, if you ever get bored, how about moving to Auckland? We can't find enough civil engineers and we could really use someone with your skills in Auckland. So, yeah, we talked down an awful little bit, but I'm not at a point right now in my life Today could pick up and move to Auckland, but maybe in three, four years I might you know. But wouldn't it be You're gonna be your first folks. Wouldn't it be great to finish your career in another city? And don't underestimate the skills that you have, folks. The things that you're doing may seem passe, but you go out there in the bigger market and you will realize just how Far ahead certain segments of the Minnesota upper Midwest market is. Yeah, the knowledge that we have here at the table would be Extremely valuable in most places in Central and South America. Yeah, but I think I share.
Marc Culver:Yeah, and I appreciate that and we are and we're trying and and we need to do a better job of that. But I also think to your point about you know the Middle East and Europe and how far ahead of us you know they are. Yet you know we continue to learn and there's still a lot for us to learn and try and and One and advocate for one thing that Malaysians have told me is is that you got to get after the politicians more.
Paul Pasko:You know, you guys talk among yourselves at the public works level. Or we did here in Malaysia 25 years ago yeah, we, we talked among each other. Yeah, but the people that sat the chairs, they didn't hear it, or they were buffered and only told parts of it. So you know, they said in America, the number one advice we'd give you is start talking to your politicians about it and explain that you can manage by the pipe segment. They probably don't know. Well, I'm sure SLP does, because you've been teaching them right, you're good, we've, we've seized the opportunity to educate on the state of our infrastructure.
Deb Heiser:Yes, yeah, we have.
Paul Pasko:Yeah, it's been fun to watch you guys do it too. The a lot of the steps you're following. You're following in the path of Munich or other places like that. Right, keep going, keep going. But the politicians got to get involved. It's a good point. It's a good point.
Marc Culver:Well, thank you, paul. This is Eric Rait. Had a blast. Lot more to unpack here on on this area, this, this technology and I'm willing to come back. I bet you are. I bet you are. So. Thank you, and they could dab. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for being my co-host today.
Deb Heiser:Well, mark, it was been. It's been a pleasure nerding out with you. I think we're all with Paul as well, and, paul, it's great to see you guys again for the audience. Paul and I've go back a long time probably 30 years, I'm guessing yep, and everything I know about trenches technology I learned from Paul there.
Marc Culver:Oh, thank you. Well, most of what I learned I also learned from Paul.
Paul Pasko:Well, you're great students. I appreciate you listening to me Well, thank you again.
Marc Culver:And you know, one last thing before we go if you have enjoyed this episode and the podcast in general, we ask that you help us spread the word. If you're on LinkedIn, comment on that. Don't just like it, but put a comment in. It actually helps us spread the word a lot more. And also Comment on our YouTube page. We have a YouTube page, so just search public works nerds on YouTube, retweet one of our posts on Twitter, or I actually opened up or created a Threads account, so you know all the for the six people that are on threads. You can check that out too, but Instagram too, and but better yet, tell your colleagues about the podcast. We really appreciate, really just want to spread the word about the podcast. So thank you.
Paul Pasko:I'll spread the word as I'm traveling around. All right, I'm the internationally, why not? You could use some followers from the Middle East, right? Thank you, bye guys. Thank you.
