Texas Border Business
McAllen, TX – An estimated 32 trillion gallons of water pollution per year (Nature Conservancy, Summer 2019) and many millions of dollars per year in EPA fines are caused by rainwater entering and then overloading our wastewater systems.
A sanitary sewer overflow (SSO) introduces toxic sewage (fecal matter, chemical cleansers, grease) into our streets, homes, businesses, lakes, streams, oceans and potentially our drinking water.
Composite Access Products (CAP) offers their watertight CAP ONE® manhole cover innovation that helps prevent SSOs, and major cities are starting to adopt the solution.
CAP manufactures traffic-rated manhole covers using a high strength fiberglass reinforced composite in McAllen, TX. CAP’s covers provide many benefits to municipalities including corrosion resistance, safer weight, theft resistance, and high-tech data transmission, all while produced with a more environmentally friendly method.
The CAP ONE® watertight composite cover stops waterflow through the cover and frame assembly “much better than others tested before” in San Antonio Water Systems water tank test.
San Antonio is the fifth of the USA’s top twenty cities to begin approving and adopting CAP covers. CAP’s President Chad Nunnery said, “we are extremely excited to make our first San Antonio covers, and we are certain CAPs can help the San Antonio area municipalities reduce sewer overflows.” Reducing water inflow into sanitary sewers and subsequent SSOs will reduce water pollution.
CAP, the first compression molder of traffic-rated composite covers Made in the USA, began molding their first covers just over three years ago and already have installed covers in nearly 300 municipalities. In addition to the incredible menu of benefits that CAPs composite covers provide, CAP also can deliver cosmetic appeal with colors, graphics and even stone and sand-like appearances.
CAP is revolutionizing this 160-year-old industry dominated by cast iron foundries with ‘high tech’ cover solutions encapsulated inside the cover itself. Sensitive circuitry would be destroyed by the 2700 °F iron melting process (sand casting) and data transmission would be blocked by surrounding metal material. Composites are processed with 1/10th of iron casting temperatures thus protecting the electronics and reducing the manufacturing process’s carbon footprint. Plus, the molded product is transparent to data allowing communications without piercing the manhole cover with antennae holes.
In their CAP RF®, CAP molds radio-frequency identification tags (RFID) into the composite cover raw materials to help municipalities with asset management which can work with cities’ geographic information systems (GIS). There are even technologies than can transmit real time data to utility teams through CAP covers which also help reduce SSOs with early detection.
San Antonio has been an early adopter of these SSO detection systems with over seven hundred manhole cover transmitters spread around the city. Many cities with SSO problems have a federal “consent decree” that demands municipalities solve these infrastructure failures that harm the environment, marine life, and our health. CAP intends to deliver its out-of-the-box composite manhole cover solutions to municipalities nationwide helping to modernize US infrastructure with San Antonio at the leading edge.
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