Rainy Season Is Coming—And Your Private Sewer Lateral Tells No Lies

Every year when the first big rain hits, something magical happens in our sewer systems—and by “magical,” I mean chaotic and extremely expensive. Stormwater starts rushing in, groundwater rises, and suddenly every tiny crack in every private sewer lateral across town decides to become a superhighway straight into the public sewer system.

And that’s the thing most people don’t realize: it’s the little pipes—the private sewer laterals (PSLs)—that cause the big headaches.

They’re old, they’re tired, they’ve been quietly suffering through decades of roots, shifting soil, and “just bury it and hope” construction from the 1960s.

During dry months, these defects are out of sight, out of mind. But add rain?

Boom! I&I. Inflow and infiltration. The sewer world’s version of “Who left the window open during a storm?”

Why Cities Freak Out (And Why Lawyers Get Excited)

Here’s where it gets interesting: under the Clean Water Act, cities are legally on the hook for preventing sewer overflows—even though the problems often start on private property. Imagine being responsible for fixing your neighbor’s leaky roof because the water dripped onto your lawn. That’s basically the municipal situation.

Because of this mismatch, cities often end up in legal battles with environmental NGOs. And trust me, these cases don’t end with a handshake. They end with something called a consent decree, which is basically the government saying:

“Okay city, you didn’t want to run a PSL program before?

Well, congratulations—you’re running one now. And it’s happening by court order.”

Suddenly the city has to inspect laterals, track conditions, enforce repairs, document everything, and make sure the whole program holds up under regulatory scrutiny.

There’s another way.

The Easier, Saner Alternative

Instead of waiting for lawyers and judges to show up with a binder the size of a phone book, cities can do something way easier: start proactive inspection cycles.

A modern PSL program—especially one that’s cloud-based and simple for both cities and property owners—does a few magical things before the rainy season turns your sewers into a water park:

• Finds cracked, offset, root-infested laterals early

• Reduces I&I before it spikes

• Helps avoid sewer overflows (which nobody wants to clean up)

• Gives property owners straightforward, non-jargon explanations

• Leads to better repair pricing and fewer surprises

Why This Matters Right Now

Rain doesn’t create sewer problems—it exposes them. The rainy season is like a stress test for every hidden flaw underground. And trust me, those flaws will introduce themselves the moment the first storm rolls through.

A simple, proactive PSL program means you find issues early, you fix them cheaper, and you avoid becoming the reason your city ends up negotiating a consent decree.

Rain is coming. Your laterals know whether they’re ready.

A little prevention is the way to do this.

Private sewer lateral programs should not use NASSCO

When presenting Zoom demos of Forward Lateral to municipalities I often get the following question: It’s all NASSCO, right?

My answer? No. This raises eyebrows. But it really shouldn’t. Let me explain.

NASSCO is the standardized language used for coding out CCTV observations in sewer lines across the United States and beyond. Surely, you can’t have people in the inspection trucks using different terminology from inspection to inspection. There’s so much variation just at different municipalities! There would be an infinite amount of ways to simply observe something as simple as a “crack.” For coding out the mainlines, NASSCO-based languages are amazing.

For private sewer lateral programs, however, such standardization actually works against the mission of NASSCO. It requires unnecessary training by plumbing contractors, and, alienates the property owner that is tasked with hiring a plumbing company to fix the lateral. Such property owners surely are not NASSCO certified, nor do they care to be. Simply, they want their private sewer lateral fixed.

So my answer on such demos with municipalities is that while NASSCO is helpful for mainlines, it is not for private sewer lateral programs. Nothing infuriates a property owner more than getting locked into a bunch of overly complex terminology that they do not understand and are forced to either become one-time experts in a field they do not care about, or surrender and pay whatever sum of money will make the problem go away. This results in higher prices and a lack of transparency.

At Forward Lateral, we wanted to make private sewer lateral inspection programs easy for property owners to understand. After all, they own the lateral.

Standardization of terms, however, is hugely important! For coding out observations in the pipe, inspectors on Forward Lateral use basic terms that can be understood by non-experts: roots, crack, offset, broken. About 15 terms in total. These observations can be individually commented on by the municipality to simply communicate A) what’s observed in the lateral, and B) what needs to be done to fix it. Easy.

Personally, I love the mission of NASSCO. But private sewer lateral programs have an obligation to property owners to communicate in commonly understood terms that empower their decision-making process to fix them. Without such communication, a breeding ground for frustration and misunderstanding occurs.

Who owns the data when private sewer lateral programs move to the cloud?

Privacy, security and data safety are key themes that come up in our demos of Forward Lateral to municipalities. It’s a common question and honestly a good question to ask. Without asking, the mind tends to wander.

The answer we’ve given since the inception of Forward Lateral is this: we preserve the status quo of PSL programs, we just do it digitally.

What does this mean?

It means that in a private sewer lateral inspection program, the property owner or real estate agent (or even construction contractor) hires a CCTV inspector to record the lateral and send it into the municipality for review. Nobody is selling the data, though it is being shared to the municipality (which is the entire idea in the first place).

Now that softwares like Forward Lateral are in the cloud, questions come up naturally about data. Do we sell that data?

The answer is NO. .

The best part about paying for something is that the company providing it doesn’t need to rely on some subtle tactic like selling data (looking at you, social media giants that sell advertising).

Simply, the property contact hires the CCTV inspector who authors the data for the municipality to review. We believe in privacy, and so should everyone else. Especially when it comes to ones own property.

Hello, World

Hello there. Jesse here. Founder of Forward Lateral. Welcome to our blog!

I started Forward Lateral realizing that my local cities condition assessment program for sewer laterals wasn’t what it could be. I felt like if I asked enough questions, listened to enough people on the ground (I’m looking at you, plumbing contractors and municipality folks), I could come up with something better.

The stated goal with Forward Lateral is bringing private sewer lateral programs to the cloud. What that means is streamlining the fifty or so tasks that are painful, repetitive, and honestly just a waste of everyone’s time. In addition, I wanted to build in very basic economic principals, such as cost-saving by time saving, and allowing property owners to get a second opinion on price and type of fix without having to learn the sewer industry or compile emails and legacy media.

Forward Lateral is about making the review/approval process for sewer lateral inspections better in municipalities that have sewer lateral programs. And to define “better” this blog is born! I intend to share everything I’ve learned in short, conversational, blogs. This is not Harvard. But this is the most innovated place to look for cloud-based tech that streamlines sewer lateral inspection programs. The date is September 13th, 2021, and I honestly think that out of 40 million people here in the State of California, I might be the most well-versed nerd on point-of-sale private sewer lateral programs. That, my friends, is kind of exciting.

Best,

Jesse A. Aizenstat