Doug Petersen is the Southern Texas 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. With expertise in smart city maintenance and asset management optimization, Doug oversees RH Borden’s expansion into new markets, implementing solutions that have enabled cities to focus resources more strategically. He is particularly interested in how digital innovations, like acoustic assessments and digital twins, are transforming how cities manage their wastewater systems.

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

• [1:37] Doug Petersen discusses how RH Borden supports municipalities with innovative wastewater solutions
• [5:33] Insights into the hidden challenges of wastewater systems
• [7:07] Introduction to RH Borden’s acoustic assessment and condition-based cleaning technology
• [10:37] How Basin IQ technology helps pinpoint inflow and infiltration issues
• [12:14] The challenge of educating municipalities on new technology and changing old habits
• [16:13] The long-term ROI municipalities can expect from adopting RH Borden’s wastewater solutions
• [17:37] How small communities can access grants for wastewater upgrades

In this episode…

Wastewater systems across the nation are struggling with aging infrastructure, inefficient practices, and growing maintenance costs. In many cities, a lack of data-driven insights leads to wasted resources and ineffective management. How can municipalities modernize their wastewater systems and ensure their longevity while managing tight budgets?

Doug Petersen, an expert in wastewater solutions, discusses how leveraging innovative technologies can help municipalities streamline their operations. He emphasizes condition-based maintenance over time-based practices, enabling cities to focus resources where they are needed most. Technologies such as acoustic assessments, digital twins of manholes, and Basin IQ sensors help municipalities pinpoint inefficiencies and better track their systems. Doug also shares the importance of educating public works departments and overcoming the resistance to change in long-established systems, ensuring a smoother implementation of modern solutions.

In this episode of Saving Our Sewers, Chad Franzen of Rise25 sits down with Doug Petersen, Southern Texas Account Manager at RH Borden, to discuss innovative wastewater solutions. Doug highlights the importance of condition-based maintenance, how data-driven insights save resources, and the challenge of introducing new technology to municipalities. He also delves into the value of education and the role of technology in reducing unnecessary work.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Jon Borden on LinkedIn 
• RH Borden and Company
• Kwin Peterson on LinkedIn
• Doug Petersen on LinkedIn
• Chad Franzen on LinkedIn
• Rise25 
• Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) 

Quotable Moments: 

• “Wastewater is one of those things that I don’t think most people kind of think about.”
• “Up to 50% of the wastewater that’s treated is water that was introduced externally — cracks or leaks can dramatically increase treatment costs.”
• “There’s the old adage, work smarter, not harder. I’m a big proponent of that, especially for improving wastewater systems.”
• “Only about 10% of the pipe actually needs to be cleaned — most cities are spending resources on pipes that are already clean.”
• “If you invest a little money ahead of time to assess and plan strategically, you’ll save much more in the long term.”

Action Steps: 

1. Focus on condition-based maintenance over time-based systems: Prioritizing pipe conditions allows municipalities to optimize resources by targeting only the areas that need attention.
2. Leverage acoustic assessments for system maintenance: Using sound waves to assess pipe conditions reduces unnecessary cleaning and directs efforts toward the most problematic areas.
3. Utilize digital twins to model infrastructure: Manhole digital twins enable cities to prioritize rehabilitation work based on data, improving efficiency and decision-making.
4. Implement Basin IQ technology to track water infiltration: This technology helps municipalities identify and address inflow and infiltration issues, saving money and improving system performance.
5. Invest in strategic long-term infrastructure planning: Early investment in wastewater system assessments can reduce long-term costs, making maintenance more efficient and cost-effective.

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.

Doug Petersen: 00:20

All right, Doug Petersen here, host of Saving Our Sewers, 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 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 our RH Borden is shaping the future of wastewater system management by visiting rhborden.com, and today I have Chad Franzen here of Rise25, who has done thousands of interviews with successful entrepreneurs and CEOs. And today, we have flipped the script, and he’ll be interviewing me. So, Chad, welcome to the show.

Chad Franzen: 01:22

Hey, thanks so much, Doug. It’s great to talk to you. Great to be here. I’m looking forward to kind of getting to know you and a little bit more about RH Borden, if you could. I know you’re an account manager in southern Texas.

Can you describe that role for us?

Doug Petersen: 01:37

Yeah. So I head up the south southern Texas region, and my role is to communicate and to connect with cities and districts, municipalities and find out how RH Borden can help help them with their some of their challenges and provide solutions to be able to help them be more efficient in their work in the wastewater and utility space. And it’s a great opportunity to open up this area. It’s a fairly new area for the company. RH Borden and I’m excited to be here and share some of those insights of different technologies and solutions that we bring to this space.

Chad Franzen: 02:11

Yeah. What brought you to this role?

Doug Petersen: 02:14

So I have been in contact with RH Borden for roughly about two years now. Actually, my coworker, my brother introduced me to the president and CEO, and we’ve had some ongoing discussions and, you know, looked at possibly opening up the southern Texas area with me living down here. And the timing became such that for my previous role and different industry, the timing came right this last summer that I was able to join on with RH Borden and to learn a whole lot. It’s been a learning experience for me to learn the wastewater space, but it’s been exciting as well to be able to add value in this industry.

Chad Franzen: 02:59

Yeah, I’ve talked to a few of your colleagues, and it sounds like RH Borden really has some innovative and amazing ways that they support municipalities. What’s kind of your take on it? How does RH Borden support cities and utilities?

Doug Petersen: 03:12

Yeah. So it’s I mentioned earlier, it’s been an education and learning experience for myself. First and foremost is understanding okay, what did the city and the wastewater supervisors, the public works director, you know, what are some of their responsibilities and some of the tasks and goals that they’re trying to accomplish? Wastewater is one of those things that I don’t think most people kind of think about. Right?

At least I didn’t previously. I mean, as far as.

Chad Franzen: 03:38

Like.

Doug Petersen: 03:39

When I take a shower, when using the sink or the toilet, that water kind of goes somewhere. But it’s something I don’t really ever kind of think about. Hey, you know what? That’s something that’s managed by people. And so it’s been interesting to learn that aspect.

And then again, with RH Borden. How we fit into this is you know, for me and my perspective is learning what thought process do these public works directors go through to, to maintain their system? And is there perhaps a better way to do it? I mean, one of the things that a skill set, if you will, something that I bring to this industry is, is a model of continuous improvement. In previous roles throughout my career have been, you know, how do we take the current state where we’re at right now?

Look at the future state. What ways can we do to optimize what we’re doing? There’s the old adage, work smarter, not harder. I’m a big proponent of that. And how we can help improve the system.

And again, with the wastewater space and the utility space, there’s challenges of having the resources, the manpower, and the budget to be able to fully accomplish all the goals that these public works directors have. And so with this technology, we can provide a kind of a bridge between some of those gaps of where they want to be versus what the resources they have to work with. And it’s been really valuable and rewarding for me.

Chad Franzen: 05:11

You know, given that wastewater is something that most people don’t think about because you don’t see it. Is there something, you know, for me, as long as my toilet’s not clogged, I’m probably in my world, everything is basically fine. There has been something that has been maybe a big surprise to you, knowing kind of. Now, as you’re getting more familiar with how things work and where things flow to.

Doug Petersen: 05:33

Yeah, yeah. One of the things that comes to my mind is, you know, I look out on the streets and you see the sewers and you see the stormwater drain systems, and you kind of picture that everything just flows and works smoothly. But one of the things down here in southern Texas especially, is you don’t realize how much auxiliary water or external water gets into the wastewater system. You know, there’s some statistics out there that up to 50% of the wastewater that’s treated is water that was introduced externally. So for example, there’s maybe cracks.

There may be some leaks in the piping system, in the sewer system that’s allowing external water to get into it. And then that just causes extra cost, extra run time on these treatment plants to treat all this excess water. And again, it’s all underneath the surface. And so something that’s kind of not visible. And it’s hard to know what’s going on.

But you know that’s one of the things that RH Borden does is to take a look at okay, how can we have, if you will, X-ray vision to see what’s going on underground. And we’re bringing to the marketplace technologies to provide this type of data to the cities to be able to know, okay, what is going on underground in my wastewater system.

Chad Franzen: 06:55

Can you tell us a little bit more about that technology, and maybe tell us which of those your clients tend to find most impactful, at least from your experience so far?

Doug Petersen: 07:07

Yeah. A quick highlight and probably former colleagues have talked about this as well. I mean, when I started about eight years ago, their first piece of technology they brought into the wastewater space was what they call what we call an acoustic assessment, where we’re able to look at the conditions of the pipe. Cities have a cleaning program in place where they’ll go through, and perhaps they’ll clean a, you know, a fourth, a quarter of their system once a once a year. So it takes four years to kind of clean the entire system.

And rather than going through and on a time based system going through and cleaning out your your wastewater system, changing the mindset to a condition based where we have a tool that we can go in with manholes and send sound waves through the piping system, and how that sound wave tracks through the system and the readings that come out the other side of the manhole kind of dictates how clean that pipe is. If the pipes are clean. No. No reason to clean it. Right.

Move on to and find, you know, we can send out a reconnaissance team and locate exactly where those dirty sections are and use your resources and limited manpower to go clean just those sections. So that’s one service that we provide. Another one is manhole virtual models. Manholes are assets. They need to be tracked and monitored.

And so we use a combination of lidar scanning and 360 videos. And to be able to give a make a digital twin of those manholes that the cities can use to make decisions on for their rehab work and prioritize which manholes actually need to be rehabbed versus ones that maybe, perhaps down the road they’re more on a on a watch list than a repair list at this point in time. Another technology that we do and is the most impactful here in Southern Texas is what we call basin IQ. And so the concept there is identifying the source points of inflow and infiltration. Where is that extra water getting into the sewer system?

And we do that by a combination of setting up a network of sensors in the manholes. Will carpet bomb, if you will. We’ll lay out this, this network of sensors where we have just anywhere from 50 to hundreds of eyeballs underground watching the water levels and in and the the thing that makes us different and that provides value to the cities is we combine that with a digital twin of the manhole, and we’re able to convert that to flow and look at hydrographs and look at overlay that with weather events and provide information and data to the city that The Hague versus kind of wondering exactly where that inflow is coming from, where that extra water is coming from, will tell you which manhole, which street segments that you need to go do the rehab work on. And so it’s always been kind of a needle in the haystack trying to locate Eni. And so with this technology, we’re able to help locate that needle and then be surgical in that rehab work and go and go fix that section of pipe and have dramatic impacts on reducing Eni into the into the into the system.

So again, for southern Texas, we get lots of rain down here. And compared to other areas. RH Borden covers. And so that has been a game changer here in southern Texas.

Chad Franzen: 10:37

What is maybe the biggest objection or stumbling block might a municipality have toward adopting this, you know, technology that seems like it could be very valuable.

Doug Petersen: 10:49

Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think like many people. The subject and the idea of changing can be hard in the sense that perhaps you have a wastewater director that’s been at the job for 20 years, and they’ve been doing it how they’ve been doing it, their maintenance program, how they’ve been doing it. And it’s been, you know, working so far. They probably recognize that there’s some opportunities for improvement.

But their previous public works director did it that way as well. And so getting the idea of, you know, there’s another way that you can do this has probably been one of the challenges. So a lot of what I’m doing since I’m kind of opening up this newer area, is I spend a lot of my time just with education, educating people on, hey there, there is a there is another way and perhaps a better way for you to be able to to look at this. And so it’s been educational for me to kind of learn what stumbling blocks that the public work directors may have. They may have to go talk to their city council and kind of talk to them about making a big change and how that they manage their wastewater system.

It could be their crews, the guys that they’re working with. No, only one way to do it. And so it’s a lot of education and introducing change which can be hard for cities or districts to implement.

Chad Franzen: 12:14

One thing I’ve found interesting in talking to some of your colleagues is that this technology not only shows maybe what they need to start focusing on more, but it also shows what they don’t, what they maybe have been paying too much attention to. Like, you don’t need to dedicate this much work to a certain area.

Doug Petersen: 12:30

Oh yeah. For sure. You know, it’s interesting. It’s, you know, here in southern Texas, a lot of cities. If we want to talk about the cleaning aspect of cleaning the sewer pipes, they’re more on a reactive basis versus an area such as in, in California. They pride themselves on going through and just cleaning the entire system.

But what we’ve shown from our assessments and studies is that only about 10% of the pipe actually needs to be cleaned, it’s most of the system is 80% or so. 75% of it is in excellent condition. You know, you have another 10 to 15% that’s kind of on the watch list, but only about 10% of it actually needs to be cleaned. So in that example, they’re going through and spending lots of water, lots of resources, equipment, time to go through and clean the pipe that’s already clean. And so again, it’s an education process that, you know, it’s some I’ve used the analogy and and and we use the analogy as far as changing the oil in the car, you know, versus changing the oil every 3 to 5000 miles or once it hits three months.

Technology is now evolving where there are sensors within those cars that show us and tell us actually based upon the condition of the oil when they change it. And so it’s just eliminating extra costs that can really help cities out.

Chad Franzen: 14:00

So let’s say you have, you know, you’ve spent time kind of educating these municipalities on the benefits of adopting this technology. And they’re like, okay, yeah, you know, we get it. Then what challenges do they face once they decide to do it in terms of change management and things like that?

Doug Petersen: 14:18

You know. I think the challenge, one of the challenges is recognizing that that it’s not going to be their, their, their field crew doing the work in the sense that we provide this as a service. And so we bring our own crews in. They are, you know, are well accustomed to installing the sensors and programming them, setting them all up and going through and doing the scans of the manholes, doing the videos of the manholes. And so a lot of public work directors are just used to having their guys be the ones that do the work.

And so breaking that mindset that, hey, it’s you know, you’re welcome to have a guy that if you want to send a crew member along to kind of help out at first as they kind of as our crew gets into a groove, that’s absolutely fine. But they don’t need to be there the whole time. You can continue to go work on all of your projects. I mean, there’s more projects in a day that they can handle. They can continue to go work on those projects, but let our crew do the work.

And then a challenge that we help walk people through is then implementing the data. So we provide the data. We’ll show them where that work needs to be done. And we’ll provide a dashboard. We provide a GIS map as well as a geographic information systems map that integrates into their systems to be able to have the data that either their city city leadership group can use, or oftentimes they have engineers that use that data as well.

And so it’s just letting them know that this information will be available to you and you will be able to take action on it, and you will see results.

Chad Franzen: 16:04

How would a municipality then measure ROI if they decide to invest in this kind of technology?

Doug Petersen: 16:13

It comes to implementing that change. And so with cities, I’ve, I’ve presented in front of city councils and presented them to what we’re doing or give them progress updates of how we’re doing that. It’s hard to see an immediate ROI. For example, you’re not going to see in the next quarter, but where you’re going to see it is in the longer term where, you know, down the road, whether it be three, you know, three quarters a year down the road or years down the road, as you implement these changes, they’ll be able to see the returns. As far as the reduction in maintenance, the acoustic assessment is a classic example where they’re having to clean less and less pipe year over year.

They’re really focusing on the dirty segments. And as they do that, it’s just going to continue every year. The amount of cleaning that needs to be done is going to be reduced because again, they’re focusing on the worst of the worst. And as you do that, the overall health of the system improves. And so it’s a long term play for sure.

And showing cities and city councils and city leadership that it is a key.

Chad Franzen: 17:24

So if they do, let’s say it’s a small community and they know that they need to modernize their system. And your system sounds great. But they’re on a budget. They’re on kind of a tight budget. What’s your response to that?

Doug Petersen: 17:37

So here in Texas, thankfully there is a Texas Water Development Board where they have grant money set aside. They have what’s called the Amps program, an asset management program for small systems. And so they’re able to apply for a grant and receive a certain portion of money. That is a true grant. That’s I don’t say free money, but it’s free.

They don’t have to pay back. And then they can also receive additional loan money to be able to improve their wastewater systems. And that’s needed. And it’s a great program. Some of the small cities honestly aren’t familiar with that.

And so we’re able to introduce that option to them to be able to help fund these projects. And, you know, there’s a lot of regulatory pressure on these cities to be compliant. If a, if a, if a sewer overflows, if a treatment plant overflows because of too much water, too much excess water, it can lead to huge fines. And then obviously for the health and safety of the community, it’s not a good thing as well. And so it’s again, some of these cities are so small that they, again, are focusing so much on just I gotta go out and fix this project today and put this fire out, and I gotta go put this fire out that we’re able to come in and help them understand that there’s help out there, and we’ll help connect you and connect those dots to be able to provide those those budgetary assistance.

Chad Franzen: 19:01

Is there any kind of common misconception or something that you wish more municipal leaders understood about infrastructure, technology?

Doug Petersen: 19:10

I think one of the misconceptions or again, education, is that if you invest a little bit of money ahead of time to really assess and strategically have a strategic plan in your wastewater maintenance, the small amount of money that you invest upfront will save you money in the long term. And so we utilized cost benefit analysis for cities to be able to realize that, you know, at a fraction of the cost. We can go out and identify what areas you don’t need to be spending resources on in manpower. And so you save that money by not going out and doing redundant work or unnecessary work. And so that is that the key is educating and helping them see that.

Again, it’s about working smarter not harder.

Chad Franzen: 20:05

Okay. Good stuff. Hey this is kind of a relatively new podcast. You’re going to be one of the co-hosts. What are you most looking forward to about being a part of it?

Doug Petersen: 20:16

I would say it’s exciting to be able to implement a new tool within our toolbox. Here at RH Borden. We’re always we’re we like to think of ourselves as on the cutting edge of innovation. And I think podcasts are one of those new ideas and concepts that are newer and newer in the industry space that we can implement here, and I’m looking forward to connecting with thought leaders within this space. You know, be able to, I guess, learn from them.

I mentioned to you that I still consider myself a newbie within this industry. And so I like to learn more. I like to learn what their thought process is. And quite frankly, as you talk to them, get to know them, they can share insights that you’re able to take out and to implement with other cities, to be able to connect with them and to be able to better understand the challenges that they’re facing and ways that we can connect those challenges with solutions.

Chad Franzen: 21:17

Okay. Sounds great. Well, hey, Doug, it’s been great to talk to you today. Very interesting and informative. I really appreciate you having me.

Doug Petersen: 21:24

All right. Thanks, Chad. Appreciate you having me on today. And it’s been a pleasure.

Chad Franzen: 21:28

Absolutely. So long, everybody.

Outro: 21:30

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.