Here is why staying proactive is essential for your property:
- Avoiding Legal Trouble: For newer properties under stormwater agreements, the city will eventually audit your records. If you haven’t maintained the system, you won’t have the necessary documentation, which can lead to notices of violation, fines, and mandatory corrective actions.
- Preventing Physical Damage: Neglect increases the risk of flooding and damage to lateral lines or grates. This doesn’t just hurt the infrastructure; it directly impacts the tenants and customers who occupy your building.
- Saving Substantial Money: Routine maintenance is much cheaper than emergency repairs. For example, cleaning a filter sack might cost $75 to $100, but replacing neglected, damaged filters can cost thousands. Similarly, pumping out a vault with minimal debris is simple, but clearing one with 5 to 10 feet of accumulated sediment is incredibly expensive.
Don’t wait for a flood or a fine to take action. Watch the video to see how a professional evaluation of your storm drains and vaults can keep your water flowing off-site and your budget intact. If you are ready to be proactive, reach out for a quote today!
Video Transcript
0:00 Intro
0:08 Non-Maintenance: Fines & Penalties
0:33 Flooding Probability
0:56 Prevent Costly Repairs
1:24 Filter Damage
0:00 Intro
Joe Warner, president at Texas Compliance Environmental and California Compliance Environmental. Our customers ask us, “What if I don’t maintain my stormwater system?”
0:08 Non-Maintenance: Fines & Penalties
There are a few things. So, if it’s a compliance-driven site, if it’s a newer property within a stormwater agreement, if you don’t maintain your stormwater system, you can see fines and penalties; a notice violation minimum. The city will audit that property eventually and you’ll have to show records. So if you don’t maintain it, you won’t have the records to show and then you’ll have issues with the city, corrective actions, etc.
0:33 Flooding Probability
Now second, if you don’t maintain your stormwater system and there aren’t agreements, you run the risk of possibly flooding or damage, impact to the lateral lines, impact to the grates where it’s going to actually impact the tenants or the customers that occupy that building. So, we want to keep the stormwater system open and clear, letting the water flow off-site, and we can do that with our preventive maintenance plans.
0:56 Prevent Costly Repairs
Another reason you want to monitor and maintain your stormwater system is to prevent from costly change orders, corrective actions. If you monitor a vault and you’re noticing that it’s accumulating trash and debris, you can pump that out when there’s not excessive sediment present. But if you go on without inspecting those, neglect will lead to excessive sediment. You can get five, seven, ten feet of materials built up in a vault and those pumpouts can be very, very costly.
1:24 Filter Damage
Also, damage to the filters. If you install filters or if filters are designed into your property and you don’t maintain those filter sacks, rather than just cleaning those out for $75 to $100 per service, it can cost you thousands of dollars to replace all those filters.
So, if you’ve been wondering what happens if you don’t maintain your stormwater system and you want to be proactive, give us a call. We can go out there and take a look at your system, evaluate everything you have going on, the current conditions, number of storm drains, number of vaults, if you have any vaults, and then we can get you set up on a maintenance plan, at least get you a quote for consideration.
