BEND, OR -- City officials are looking to upgrade equipment to keep up with growing infrastructure. Utilities Director Mike Buettner tells KBND News his department wants to purchase a new closed-circuit TV Van to inspect sewer pipes, “Usually with a TV van, the technology takes quite a leap forward, when you replace it, once every 10 years, the monitors are quite a bit different. This one's going to come with some battery technology, so we don't have to have an additional generator, which is kind of nice.” He says the technology plays a big role in infrastructure maintenance, “The closed-circuit television vans serve a few purposes for us. Primarily they allow us to drop down cameras into sewer collections infrastructure and take a closer look at the sewer collections piping infrastructure to really see what's happening. Sort of like a video game operator with a joystick… control its wheels and have it crawl up the sewer line and video what's going on in that sewer line.”

Buettner says they’re keeping an eye on the future, “The city has a collection system master plan that is on the horizon. That's a big engineering exercise where our engineering department looks at the entire system in its entirety and really looks at ‘what are our weak points? Where are we going to grow? Where do we need to invest dollars into our system?’”