The Contractor, the Camera, & the AI: Inside the Modern Manhole Inspection Workflow

Why manhole inspection finally caught up to mainline CCTV

Mainline CCTV inspection has evolved dramatically over the past two decades. Manhole inspection? Not so much. For most of the industry, the playbook stayed the same for 20, 30, even 40 years: measuring tape, a few topside photos, and rotating cameras producing footage that engineers couldn’t code, couldn’t analyze, and couldn’t use to make confident rehabilitation decisions.

The economics told the story. Specialty manhole scanning cameras used to cost anywhere from $50,000 to over $200,000. Confined space entry required two trained operators, fall protection, atmospheric monitoring, and an hour or two per manhole. Costs that simply didn’t pencil out at scale. So most programs defaulted to the cheapest substitute: pop the lid, shine a flashlight, note a couple things, and move on.

The result was a data gap that cost everyone at once. Contractors were stuck with low-margin manhole work and no way to differentiate on quality. Municipalities were making capital decisions on incomplete information, losing two or three manholes a year to collapse, with replacement bills running $60,000 to $100,000 each. And engineers were extrapolating from samples and building in conservatism because they didn’t have a better option to put on a spec sheet.

That math has changed.

The webinar: three vantage points on a modern workflow

On May 20, SewerAI hosted a 60-minute webinar, The Contractor, the Camera, and the AI: Inside the Modern Manhole Inspection Workflow, with four practitioners who work in this space every day. The conversation covered the full workflow in the same order it actually happens in the field: the contractor, the camera, and the AI.

The panel:

• Jamie Truax, Owner/President, Truax Corporation (New England-based inspection contractor, fourth-generation owner)
• Kevin Marsh, Director of Innovation, TREKK Design Group
• Samantha Pierce, Technical Account Manager, SewerAI
• Eric Sullivan, Director of Strategic Development and NASSCO-certified MACP trainer since 2012, SewerAI

Part 1: The contractor

Jamie Truax was direct about it: manholes used to be work that Truax actively avoided.

“Manholes kind of slowed us down,” he said. “We do tons of mainline work, tons of hydro excavation, but manholes didn’t put us where we were.”

The old workflow was labor-intensive and error-prone. Operators were hard-measuring with tapes, taking still photos, manually entering data into software, sometimes writing it down on paper in the field. The NASSCO MACP mandatory fields had to be filled in by hand. Pipe diameters got guessed from GIS or eyeballed. Topside photos gave you almost nothing about what was actually happening inside the structure.

“Even if you’re doing a Level 2, you can still miss a lot,” Jamie said. “It was a huge headache, and we definitely did not do as much.”

The shift came when the specs started changing. Engineers and municipalities began asking for structured deliverables: interactive 3D models, coded defects, data that didn’t require weeks of follow-up to collect. “They don’t want to wait months, or reach out multiple times just to collect simple data,” Jamie said. “This really does streamline and speed up the process.”

Today, Truax runs 100+ manhole inspections per crew per day. Jamie timed it in the field: about 51 seconds for an average 8-to-12-foot manhole. The process is straightforward. Extend the camera rig before you start, pull up to the manhole, put out the SewerAI board with the manhole number, drop the camera in, pull it up, get back in the truck, and go.

“It’s beyond simple how quick and efficient it is,” he said.

Part 2: The camera

Kevin Marsh, Director of Innovation at TREKK Design Group, opened with a point that often gets undersold: the AI is only as good as the data going in.

“You can have the best camera out there, and if the people in the field aren’t operating it correctly and capturing what you need, you’ve got nothing,” he said.

TREKK Design Group is a civil engineering and consulting firm based in Kansas City, doing tens of thousands of manhole inspections a year as a service to clients. The frustration with available equipment (too expensive, too heavy, truck-mounted, not practical at scale) led the company to develop its own solution: the TREKK 360.

The system is built around a tripod, motorized winch, lighting rig, and a commercially available 360 camera (currently the Insta360 X5). One of the key design decisions was not to develop a camera in-house. “If you’re not in the consumer camera space and you try to develop a camera, by the time you get one out, it’s going to be two or three generations behind,” Kevin explained. Instead, TREKK built a robust, lightweight system around whatever the best available camera happens to be.

The full kit weighs about 8 pounds. A single operator can carry it all day, go over fences, into easements, through the woods. Kevin noted that when he started at TREKK 18 months ago, he had never seen a manhole inspection before, but it only took him two or three times in the field to get good at it.

The camera is self-leveling, descending dead straight down the centerline of the manhole. Two lenses capture 185 degrees each; the images are stitched together into a full 360 view. Unlike legacy cameras that rotated on the way down, distorting the geometry and making models approximate, the TREKK 360 produces stable, predictable footage that photogrammetry can actually use.

“Other cameras rotate on the way down. That messes up the model,” Jamie noted. “With the TREKK 360, it’s dead straight the whole way. The models come out perfect.”

On winter operations and fog: Jamie’s crews inspected through a brutal New England winter. For manholes with heavy heat and condensation, a blower or heat gun at the rim clears enough fog for the camera to capture clean footage. For lens fogging, the fix is simple: keep the camera warm in the truck rather than letting it sit out in the cold before dropping it into a warm structure. The camera is also fully submersible, so splash from flow is not a concern.

Part 3: The AI

Once footage uploads to PIONEER, SewerAI’s Sewer3D process goes to work.

Eric Sullivan walked attendees through a live demo of the platform. Sewer3D uses photogrammetry, taking pixels from the digital images and representing them as points in 3D space, to produce a dense point cloud and a textured 3D model of the structure. A calibration board with fiducial markers, lowered into the manhole with the camera, provides the scale reference so the model is dimensionally accurate from the start.

From a single upload, the platform automatically produces:

• A photogrammetric 3D model (digital twin) with a measurable point cloud
• An unfolded 2D flat view of the structure wall
• NASSCO MACP Level 1 or Level 2 condition assessment data, including automatic component measure-downs (rim to invert, pipe connections, diameters, materials)

The Level 2 workflow is AI-assisted, not fully automated. SewerAI’s AutoCode computer vision pipeline runs first, surfacing conditions and completing measurements automatically. Then a NASSCO MACP-certified technician reviews the output, validates the AI predictions, and completes the remaining data entry requirements. Every survey is auditable.

“Speed and consistency from the AI on measurements and defect detection is all there,” Eric said. “But also, a credentialed, industry-certified human being is reviewing and signing off on those outputs.”

SewerAI has processed nearly 150,000 MACP Level 2 surveys through the platform over the past few years, and is on pace to complete nearly 50,000 in 2026 alone.

For teams that want to code in-house, the platform supports that too. The 360 digital scan streams in any browser, and a MACP coder on your own team can work remotely from their desk.

The platform also includes collaboration tools: review tasks, teammate tagging, and defect-linked comments that send teammates directly to the relevant video frame. Reports are available in quick and long-form formats, shareable as open links (no login required) or exported as static PDFs. GIS data is baked in, so deliverables drop straight into a city’s existing systems.

The workflow end-to-end

The full loop runs in four steps:

1. Capture. TREKK 360 in the field. Drop it in, pull it up, move to the next manhole. Truax is running 100+ per crew per day.
2. Upload. Footage streams directly to Pioneer. No specialist post-processing, no manual data entry required.
3. Process. Sewer3D renders the 3D reconstruction, unfolded flat view, and measurable point cloud automatically. Available in the platform within 60 to 120 minutes.
4. Deliver. Engineer-ready output, often same day. NASSCO MACP coding turnaround averages 5 days; the standard SLA is 10 days.

“The same workflow that used to take weeks, now you can produce a defensible, engineering-ready deliverable in the same day or a couple of days,” Eric said. “That’s not an incremental improvement. That’s a different category of program.”

The numbers from Truax’s operation

Samantha Pierce closed the main presentation with the actual results from Truax’s operation:

• 100+ manholes per crew per day, same crew, same trucks, different tool
• 3D model turnaround in hours after upload
• Minimal crew training required. The operator drops the camera in; the technical work happens in the cloud
• 1 million+ linear feet of annual CCTV inspections, unchanged. The manhole program didn’t cannibalize the mainline program, it was added on top of it

“Adding a real manhole inspection program to an existing CCTV program used to require a separate crew, separate equipment, separate everything,” Samantha said. “Now it just requires a camera and a software subscription. You can do it right alongside everything else. That’s asymmetrical economics built into the inspection program.”

What’s coming: risk and rehab for manholes

Eric previewed an upcoming extension of SewerAI’s Risk and Rehab module, already in use for mainline inspection data, to manhole data. The same configurable risk scoring engine, the same map and table views, extended to vertical structures.

“It’s not just about pipes, and it’s not just about vertical structures either,” Eric said. “Infiltration finds a way in and affects both types of structures.” The module will allow teams to weigh factors like age, depth, material, specific defects, and the criticality of each structure relative to the rest of the collection system.

Beta access was expected within weeks of the webinar. Teams interested in early access can reach out to SewerAI directly.

Q&A highlights

What application do you use to capture manhole inspection data?
Jamie: “Everything with TREKK, and then right to SewerAI that day. That’s about as easy as it is.”

How many manholes can one crew do in a day?
Jamie: “One camera, one crew, usually two guys. You can definitely average 100, if not more. I’ve timed it in the field. It’s about 51 seconds for an average 8-to-12-foot manhole.”

What is the pricing for manhole inspection on the East Coast?
Jamie: “It all depends on whether you’re doing Level 1 or Level 2. I’ve seen bids as low as $90 per manhole and well into the $200s. There’s a lot of variables.”

What does the software cost?
Eric: Pioneer is $12,000 per year, which includes one edit seat, unlimited storage, and unlimited view users. AutoCode is available pay-as-you-go or on volume commitments, ranging from approximately $30 to $40 per manhole depending on volume. Risk and Rehab has its own pricing, either blended with AutoCode or priced per miles of collection system or population served.

What does the TREKK 360 system cost?
Kevin: “The whole system, everything you need to go do what Jamie’s doing, is $10,250, with a full one-year warranty on every component.”

How do you match video files to the right manhole number?
Samantha: The recommended approach is a CSV uploader tool that lets you tie video file names to manhole numbers, street addresses, and other GIS data after upload. Having the manhole number on a board visible in the video provides an extra audit step.

Can the camera get stuck in a manhole like a mainline CCTV camera?
Eric: “Very hard. In normal use, you’re not making physical contact with anything in the structure.”

Watch the full recording above, or reach out to the SewerAI team with questions about the platform, the TREKK 360 hardware, or Truax Corporation’s inspection services.