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From Chronic Crisis to Quick Wins With High-Impact I&I Solutions With Kwin Peterson

kwin-peterson

Kwin Peterson

Kwin Peterson is Senior Account Manager at RH Borden and Company, a Salt Lake City-based firm applying advanced sensor technology and data-driven solutions to modernize wastewater and sewer systems across the US. He has supported more than 60 collection systems in becoming more efficient through condition-based maintenance and innovative assessment tools. Kwin also serves on the San Francisco Bay Section Collection Systems Committee. Before joining RH Borden, he spent 17 years in the electric utilities industry working in education, public relations, and technical committee support.

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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • [2:11] Kwin Peterson highlights how Northern California studies revealed the “low-hanging fruit” effect of I&I
  • [3:19] The San Rafael breakthrough case: 1.4M gallons traced to a single drain source
  • [4:36] How the 80/20 principle transforms sewer repair strategies
  • [9:25] Kwin explains the financial burden of storm-driven wastewater surges
  • [14:14] Mindset shift in wastewater management: chronic problem versus acute, fixable issue

In this episode…

Across many cities, routine storms can overwhelm wastewater systems and expose costly infrastructure gaps. Hidden sources of inflow and infiltration often go unnoticed until they create major treatment burdens. What if targeting just a few key sources could save money, resources, and capacity?

The biggest issues are often the easiest to fix, according to Kwin Peterson, an expert in wastewater infrastructure and inflow and infiltration detection. Rather than relying on slow, high-cost studies, he points to an emerging 80/20 “low-hanging fruit” pattern where a small number of defects drive most of the damage. Real-world examples include a San Rafael system that cut storm flows by 81% after fixing a single source contributing over 1.4 million gallons, and a Half Moon Bay case where routine flooding workarounds quietly cost thousands per event. Kwin also emphasizes a critical mindset shift from treating I&I as a chronic burden to an acute, solvable problem, reinforced by better detection and targeting. These insights show how cities can address long-standing infrastructure challenges with faster, more measurable results.

In this episode of Saving Our Sewers, Kwin Peterson, Senior Account Manager at RH Borden and Company, is interviewed by Chad Franzen of Rise25 to discuss inflow and infiltration challenges and rapid fixes. Kwin explains 80/20 “low-hanging fruit” wins, shares San Rafael’s 1.2M-gallon reduction case, and breaks down Half Moon Bay’s hidden costs. He also explores shifting from chronic to acute problem-solving and the role of smarter sensor deployment.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments: 

  • “So this last winter, we had 12 studies to locate.”
  • “So places with high monsoon rains, seasonal rains, it’s a particularly big burden.”
  • “These are measuring flow at various locations in the system.”
  • “What we’ve found here in the systems is indeed, about 20% of the system defects are producing 80% of the I&I.”
  • “This problem has existed for longer than anybody at this system has even worked there.”

Action Steps: 

  1. Identify high-impact inflow and infiltration sources using targeted data collection: This is important because it quickly reduces the system-wide load and prevents unnecessary spending on low-value repairs.
  2. Prioritize 80/20 “low-hanging fruit” defects in wastewater systems: This matters because a small percentage of issues typically drives the majority of inflow and infiltration problems.
  3. Deploy high-density sensors across collection networks: This is critical because it improves visibility and allows teams to pinpoint problem areas with far greater accuracy and speed.
  4. Replace slow, multi-year study cycles with rapid field validation and action: This is important because it shortens the time between detection and repair, reducing wasted engineering costs.
  5. Reframe inflow and infiltration as an acute, solvable issue rather than a chronic condition: This matters because it shifts operational mindset toward faster decisions and more aggressive problem-solving.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by RH Borden, the leading service provider for innovative technologies that modernize wastewater collection system maintenance.

As Smart Cities evolve, RH Borden empowers communities to leverage data, optimize maintenance resources, and improve system performance. Their digital twin solutions help teams work more efficiently, minimize redundant maintenance, and pinpoint infrastructure issues with precision.

Learn more about how RH Borden is shaping the future of wastewater system management by visiting rhborden.com.

Powered by Rise25 Podcast Production Company

Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:03

The US Infrastructure Report Card gives the nation’s wastewater systems a grade of D+. Welcome to the Saving Our Sewers podcast, where we feature the practices, tools, technology, and ideas that will save our sewers. Let’s get into it.

Kwin Peterson: 00:20

Kwin Peterson here, host of the Saving Our Sewers podcast, where we feature city leaders, innovative engineers, and infrastructure experts who are shaping the future of rapidly growing municipalities through smarter technology and data-driven solutions. This episode is brought to you by RH Borden, providing data-driven approaches to wastewater collection system management. RH Borden helps collection system operators bridge the gap in funding labor and other resources with technology that eliminates wasted cleaning and CCTV efforts, automates manhole management, and dramatically reduces inflow and infiltration. You can learn more about how RH Borden is shaping the future of wastewater by visiting rh.com. Now, before we get on with our program today, I want to give you a shout out to Chris Parker and encourage you to listen to our conversation with him.

Chris is based in Florida. He’s on our mind this week because we just opened up Florida to our inflow and infiltration approach, and we’re finding that true to his insights, which are in that episode, there is a huge iron eye problem in Florida rivals anything happening anywhere else in the country. Fascinating insights. Check out Chris at our episode on our page, or go to infraterra.com and visit with Chris. All right.

I have Chad Franzen here. He’s from Rise25. He’s done thousands of interviews with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs, and we are flipping the script today. He’s going to be interviewing me. Chad, welcome to the show.

Chad Franzen: 01:57

Hey, thanks so much, Kwin. Always great to talk to you. I’m here to talk to you today because I know you did something that was kind of eye opening this past winter, and I’m looking forward to hearing about it. Hearing about it. What did you do and why?

Kwin Peterson: 02:11

Well, so the reason we got to get on this is because we’ve got this like huge news. And it has taken a couple of weeks for us to really get our hands and our heads around what happened this winter. And just in the last few days to realize what the implications of this are. So this last winter, we had 12 studies to locate. I am going on here in Northern California.

This is in addition to dozens of studies, other parts of the country, Texas, Utah, elsewhere where we were looking at this Colorado, California is very seasonal. So we really were focused on the winter time here in California. And what we found this winter that kind of blew our minds was what we’re calling the low hanging fruit effect of inflow and infiltration. The implications of it are just staggering.

Chad Franzen: 03:15

So tell us a little bit more about what you learned then.

Kwin Peterson: 03:19

Okay. So let me set the stage for you here. The way we’ve been dealing with inflow and infiltration in Northern California is due to an expensive study with an engineering firm. Have them put out a few area velocity monitors. These are measuring flow at various locations in the system.

And then take some of those results. They’re not at very high resolution. They’re like, you know, somewhere in this ten miles of pipe, we have a significant source of infiltration and then spending several hundred thousand dollars to maybe line a few thousand feet of pipe that we think, based on what we’re seeing with cameras, might be the problem. This is the way it’s been going well, for more than 20 years here in Northern California. And this pace obviously has been kind of slow because you spend the winter, you get just a smidgen of data, and then you go out and you do very expensive projects to try and fix it and hope that you found the problem.

What we saw this year in two different studies was obvious low hanging fruit. And this confirmed something that we suspected might be happening in various wastewater systems, which is a power law and power laws. Chad, I know you’re familiar with the power law that it’s also called the 80/20 principle, where 80% or more of something is being caused by 20% or less of another thing. What we’ve what we’ve found here in the systems is indeed, about 20% of the system defects are producing 80% of the I&I. And the implication of that is we should no longer be expecting to do a little bit of work and maybe see a few hundred gallons of I&I drop out of our system.

What we’ve seen is possible now is if you can identify that 20%, that you can make real progress very quickly. And I’ll just share a couple of examples here from last winter. Chad. We had a district called San Rafael Sanitary District. And last winter we found one part of their system that was producing the vast majority of their water.

It was produced over a 48 hour period, 1.4 million additional gallons during a rainstorm. And the reason this is a problem is that all of that water costs money. Every gallon has a dollar attached to it, a dollar figure attached to it, because money has to be spent to pump that water. Money has to be spent to buy chemicals to treat that water. Money has to be spent for blowers to blow air through that water as it’s being treated.

Money has to be spent to store that water. Every, every, every gallon, you know, has some money attached to it. So finding one source of 1.4 million gallons, that’s a pretty big deal. And the system, the system operators there in San Rafael We’re able to do this. They located one drain connected to one broken pipe that was producing the vast majority of that area’s water.

They fixed that over the last summer. And this winter, when we went back to that location, we saw an 81% reduction in flow. And that equals 1.2 million gallons of less water coming through during a storm this year compared to last year. And for those who are not really familiar with what that means, that means they went out and spent, you know, 30, $40,000 and two days and made a repair that is going to change everything about this system for years going forward. This problem has existed for longer than anybody at this system has even worked there.

They didn’t even know about it. And now it’s gone and they’re wet. Weather flows. That’s that flow that’s happening when it’s raining. Have been reduced by 1.2 million gallons.

This is a system that had about nine X flows. And that means we measure wastewater in a unit called MGD. Million gallons per day. And it’s not uncommon in systems in the Bay area to have wet weather flows that are nine times ten times 13 times above what the dry weather flows are. When we get that much more water, we’re getting capacity because the system isn’t designed for that much water.

It’s designed for nine, ten, 13% less water than what’s happening. We get capacity shortages. We get systems that can’t treat all of the water. We get spills and spills too, which is never a good story. So the really exciting thing and the thing that we just want to shout from the rooftops is if a system is struggling with I&I, and most of them are at least here in the Bay area, we, we can now, we now have evidence that we can go in and with one action reduced by, in this case, over a million gallons, the amount of burden that they have from that wet weather flow.

Chad Franzen: 09:25

So what does that look like from a maybe a financial standpoint?

Kwin Peterson: 09:29

Well, yeah, it depends on how much water costs to be treated. Now in this case, we don’t have an exact dollar amount because all of their water gets mixed together with water from a couple of other agencies. They are getting billed for it, but it’s the billing that happens in aggregate over a longer period of time. So we don’t know in this case how much money 1.2 million gallons means. But we do know what it costs in terms of, well, we have a pretty good idea of how much the electricity costs because it was all going through one pump station.

And we could see that when it rained, their electric bill at this pump station was going from $30 to $60,000 for a month. So there’s that. There’s that going on there. Now we do have another case where there’s a city and their treatment plant has figured out what the gal, what the cost per gallon is. It seems a little high.

But what they were telling us in this, this other city, is that they were charging the city $0.50 per gallon to treat wastewater. And this is the city of Half Moon Bay. This was another case that we found this winter where as we looked at the data, we were able to see the data tell us that there is a specific type of low hanging fruit. In this case, somebody in the community is opening a sanitary sewer manhole to drain a flooded area. A place that has got flooded when it rains because there isn’t enough drainage there.

And what we saw is that over the course of the winter, this happened four times. And each one of those occasions contributed an extra 40,000 gallons of water to the system. And if we take the number of $0.50 per gallon, that means that every time it rained and flooded this one area and this guy went out and opened this manhole, it cost the city $20,000. Yeah. So, we’re starting to see things like this.

And the reason that this is so important is because it’s so disruptive to the status quo and the status quo. Frankly, Chad is hopeless. It’s like it’s going to rain again this year. Well, I hope we see a little bit less water than we saw last year, but we’re not expecting very much. And now what I’d like to tell people who are struggling with this is maybe you ought to set your sights a little bit higher.

Like, well, we’re going to get a lot of water this year, but we should see a lot less additional water because we made the fix. That seemed to be our worst problem since last winter.

Chad Franzen: 12:17

And what was the fix again?

Kwin Peterson: 12:20

Well, in the case of San Rafael, it was stopping off a storm drain that was inadvertently connected to the sanitary sewer and fixing a broken pipe that was allowing a lot of storm water into the system. In the case of Half Moon Bay, it was identifying a specific manhole that is being illegally opened up during a storm to drain a flooded street area.

Chad Franzen: 12:47

And these are symptoms that these cities or towns are dealing with are probably common among every city.

Kwin Peterson: 12:55

Yeah, it really depends. There are obviously I&I is a bigger problem in places where it rains. It’s a huge problem in Texas. It’s a problem in Florida, as we mentioned in that shout out at the beginning of the episode. And it’s a huge problem here.

It’s a problem in the Pacific Northwest. I think one of the things that makes it interesting for Northern California is our rain is so very, very seasonal. So from October to March here we can get massive rainstorms, but then we’re not going to get anything else for the rest of the year. And that means that one of the ways that system operators deal with I&I is they just build extra capacity. And if you’re building extra capacity, that’s going to sit idle for eight months out of the year.

Well, that’s a huge financial burden that the city is carrying for a problem that really has only limited applicability. It’s not as big a problem maybe in Florida or the Pacific Northwest where it rains constantly. And that capacity and that capability is being used all the time. So places with high monsoon rains, seasonal rains, it’s a particularly big burden.

Chad Franzen: 14:14

So given what you now know, what should a city like, you know, a city that faces those kinds of conditions regularly, what maybe how can they change their mindset moving forward?

Kwin Peterson: 14:25

Yeah. And you’ve hit it exactly on the head there, Chad. It’s totally about mindset. For a lot of these people who are doing this work, they’ve been doing it for 20 years. Has this been their entire career?

And you know, it’s a cycle. It’s this and I am in chronic pain. And what we’ve now figured out is let’s stop treating it as a chronic pain and treat it as an acute pain, something that can be treated, something that can be fixed, something where we can see real, real progress made in most cases pretty rapidly. We’ve. Yeah, that’s the big takeaway is just to stop thinking about it as a chronic problem and to begin to think of it as something that might just be fixable.

Chad Franzen: 15:14

And RH Borden can help.

Kwin Peterson: 15:16

Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, RH Borden, this is the technique that we’ve come up with that allows us to do high-density sensor installations. We can now do this at scale. It doesn’t really matter how large or how small the system is.

We can deploy sensors at a scale that makes sense to answer the questions of what? Where is the water coming from and where is the low-hanging fruit? Because almost every system has that low hanging fruit.

Chad Franzen: 15:48

Okay, good to know. Is there anything else we should be aware of before I let you go?

Kwin Peterson: 15:54

No, I just really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this with somebody because it’s so. This is one of those things that is going to change people’s lives and change people’s careers. We’re going to be able to significantly lower the cost of these wet weather flows, which ultimately benefits ratepayers and wastewater professionals alike.

Chad Franzen: 16:21

Okay. Awesome. Hey, always great to talk to you, Kwin.

Kwin Peterson: 16:24

Well, thank you so much, Chad. I appreciate the interest.

Chad Franzen: 16:27

So long, everybody.

Outro: 16:28

Thanks for listening to the Saving Our Sewers podcast. We’ll be back next time with more insights you can use. Be sure to click and subscribe to get future episodes.