Preventative maintenance can help prevent costly sewer backup claims

There is no more challenging and stressful claim than having to assist someone who has had their home flooded with raw sewage, which is an environmental hazard and public health risk.

Sewer backups to private property account for approximately 40% of general liability insurance losses incurred by municipalities each year. And they are expensive. MIIA’s average sewer loss is just over $12,000 for an unfinished basement area. And they go up from there. According to an article in Claims Journal, a typical claim averages in the mid $30,000’s, and the cost is increasing annually at a rate far more than inflation.

If you do the math — take your deductible per claim and multiply that by 20 sewer claims a year — you could be talking hundreds of thousands of dollars your community will need to pay out. And that doesn’t include the personnel hours and overtime often required to fix the problem.

It’s far better to do the preventative maintenance now than pay later.

Municipalities should include the following minimum preventive maintenance components in their sewer system program:
• Implement schedules for planned inspection in every area of the sewer collection system, including all utility access holes and pipelines. Local conditions will determine the type and frequency of inspection needed for sewers and utility access holes. As a general guide, it is recommended that inspections of the public sewer system take place every 18 to 36 months.
• Implement schedules for planned maintenance in every area of the sewer collection system, including cleaning of sewer lines, where evidence of impeded water flow is identified. Local conditions and equipment will determine how frequently sewers and utility access holes should be scheduled for cleaning.
• Implement schedules for more frequent inspection and cleaning of known or potential problem areas, as identified by sewer staff or consulting engineers (e.g., sewers with excess debris accumulation, intruding tree roots, flat slopes, etc.).
• Implement schedules for inspection and cleaning of pump stations and equip them with alarms that ring to a staffed location or on-call pager in the event of a power failure or high wet-well level, as well as an alternative power source to maintain a minimum level of service during outages.
• Develop a process and schedule for inspection, maintenance and improvement of municipally owned portions of sewer service connections (if appropriate).
• Develop a process for monitoring and gauging the impact of rainfall on the sewer system, so that appropriate actions can be initiated as necessary to prevent or mitigate surcharging and sanitary sewer overflows.
• Develop procedures for avoiding an excess surge in downstream lines when removing blockages.
• Implement a plan to identify, prioritize and fund the repair or replacement of deteriorated system components.
• Appropriate methods for documenting inspection, maintenance and improvement activities. Documenting your preventative maintenance can also assist your community in defending claims in circumstances where you may not be legally liable. MIIA members can contact their risk manager for a sample detailed reporting form.

If preventive maintenance cannot be completed at the scheduled time, a supervisor should be notified immediately, and the activity should be rescheduled as soon as possible.

Every community should also prepare, and regularly review and revise, an emergency response plan. The ERP should be developed to assure that applicable personnel are prepared to take timely and efficient action in the event of a sewer incident.

Written by Stephen Batchelder, MIIA VP of Claims Operations and Risk Management