Mirror photo by J.D. Cavrich Logan Township GPS survey crew members include John Albright (left) and Chet Kowalski, who entered coordinates plotting a drainage system along Cantebury Drive in Lakemont.

It looked vaguely papal, as green-vestured Bo Albright, attended by Chet Kowalski, bore a tall staff from place to place on the avenues of Chapel Hill Estates, stopping from time to time to set down the rod, like a prelate pausing to bless his flock.

Albright and Kowalski are equipment operators for Logan Township, and on that recent day, their mission was environmental, in line with one of the passions of Pope Francis.

Mounted on Albright’s staff was a Geographical Information Systems tracker, which the men used to record the locations and elevations of storm sewer inlets and outfalls, piping, ditches, swales and detention ponds — part of a countywide effort to comply with a federal mandate to keep storm runoff from carrying pollution into streams.

“To most people it probably seems boring,” Kowalski said. “To us, it seems kind of neat.”

The township is one of 11 Blair County municipalities working together to comply with MS4 requirements handed down from the federal Environmental Protection Agency to the state Department of Environmental Protection to local governments.

“It’s an unfunded mandate,” said township Planning Director Cassandra Schmick.

The municipalities have been cooperating for years as the Blair County MS4 Working Group.

They’ve recently formed a council of governments, the Intergovernmental Stormwater Committee, which will begin functioning in January.

The municipalities are mapping their systems independently of one another.

In addition to the elevation and location data required for mapping, Albright and Kowalski are also collecting details like the size and composition of piping, the type and depth of inlets, the number of pipes entering and leaving each inlet and whether the grates are safe for bicycles.

While they’re on site, they might as well gather the additional information, said the men and Schmick.

The township and even the DEP may want that information at some point, the men said.

The township could have hired a contractor to complete the work, but it would have been costly, said Lamar Dively, the highway department foreman.

Albright and Kowalski are friendly, joking easily.

Albright’s staff was topped with a fixture that looked like a sunlight set in a yard.

The GPS device — it resembled an oversized calculator — was strapped to the middle of the staff.

Kowalski wielded a measuring tape and carried other tools in a backpack.

The backpack included “Scooby Snacks,” Albright said.

Lots of walking involved

They get their daily “12,000 steps,” Kowalski said.

They do the work when they don’t have something else that takes priority, like plowing, they said.

They keep on the lookout for problems like collapsed pipes or covered pipe ends.

The township’s MS4 permit requires them to finish by September, Kowalski said.

They expect to finish months before that, he said.

The township is “usually pretty good at getting ahead of things,” Kowalski said.

They began the project by mapping “outfalls,” where pipes discharge into streams.

Albright holds the sensor on top of inlets to fix their position and elevation, then walks the path of the piping, ditch or swale between inlets, tracing a corresponding line that is reflected on the small screen of the device. The instrument records the information, which eventually will take the form of an “overlay” on township planning maps, while also becoming part of the overall map of storm sewer infrastructure for the COG.

Mapping the systems will enable inspectors who find pollution discharging from an outfall to trace the piping back to locate the source of the pollution, Schmick said.

That source might be a repair garage dumping used oil, for instance, she indicated.

The collected data will also enable workers to calculate the carrying capacity of the infrastructure.

Beyond the demands of MS4, the information can make it easier and more efficient for the township to deal with problems like broken pipes, especially when residents notify officials of those problems.

Can aid in repairs

Instead of going to the scene to determine what’s needed for a repair, then coming back to prepare, employees may be able to find out what’s needed from the maps, she said.

Similarly, when a developer proposes a project, the township can tell the developer’s engineer the size and kind of piping that will be receiving the development’s runoff, she said.

The exercise will also memorialize what is currently “information in the heads of highway workers,” Schmick said.

“In this day and age, you need that to be electronically captured,” she said. “So one day when those people are not around here (the township won’t lose it).”

Albright and Kowalski are following a protocol that the other municipalities in the COG will also follow, so the resulting set of data will be consistent, Schmick said.

“We’ll be able to put it all together” and see the system as a whole, she said.

It’s not always straightforward for the men.

At one point, they came upon a pair of large manhole covers about 30 feet apart.

One was labeled Sanitary Sewer.

The other was labeled Storm.

Because the storm system in the area was a succession of ditches interspersed with pipes the township had installed at the requests of residents willing to pay the cost of materials, the men suspected the “storm” manhole was also part of the sanitary system — especially because it seemed one of a pair with the other manhole.

But they had to be sure, so at break time, they returned to the municipal garage on Michele Drive, got a manhole cover hook, brought it back and yanked the cover off.

They could tell by the depth and conformation of the manhole and the steady stream of water running at the bottom that it was indeed part of the sanitary system.

Someone apparently didn’t have a correctly labeled cover at the time the system was built, they said.

They would get it corrected, they said.

At another location, the men found a “silt sack” encasing an inlet — a remnant from a nearby house construction project a couple of years ago that workers had forgotten to remove.

The sack kept them from determining all the data on the inlet and could have resulted in a water backup during heavy rain.

So they summoned a backhoe from a nearby township work site to lift the heavy inlet cover, which enabled them to remove the sack.

Pipes confusing

At yet another site, the men encountered a storm drain with an 18-inch inlet pipe, a 24-inch outlet pipe, a 12-inch inlet pipe over top of the 18-incher that was meant to carry water under a driveway and a 12-inch perforated pipe over the 24-incher that was designed to receive water from the swaled surface above it.

That took a while to figure out.

At still another location, the men looked for a discharge point across Canterberry Drive in the woods before realizing the system crossed the street about 150 yards away.

Once, the men had to scramble down a rocky embankment to check an outfall, and once, Albright had to use the laser pointer on the GPS to remotely obtain elevation and location for the inlet pipe to a gated detention pond.

“The day goes by fast,” Kowalski said.

It was cold, but Albright didn’t mind.

“Would I prefer it?” he asked rhetorically. “No.” he said. He’d prefer the weather in the Carolinas, he said.

But the job isn’t bad, he said.

The difficulty of Albright’s work with the GPS device was consistent from point to point.

The difficulty of Kowalski’s work varied from easy on shallow inlets to tricky on deep ones with multiple piping coming in and out, because those required squinting into the darkness at an angle through the openings of the grates to follow a flashlight beam to the tip of his tape measure.

The men asked for the work.

“I volunteered for it, then I volunteered him,” Albright said of Kowalski.

They’re co-equal, and trade off roles following lunch.

Initially, the township hired a contractor, who did some of the mapping work.

Albright helped and learned the procedure.

Schmick figured the township could handle the rest, and the men set to work in early November.

“We have fun,” Kowalski said.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 949-7038.