Underground Construction - January 2018 - 40

Jeff Tinlin
recently graduated with his MBA,
is helping me run the business.
It's centered around the Inline
Jetsonde, a device that I designed
and patented to be used on sewer
jetting equipment while cleaning
pipelines. My goal with this company is to bring new and innovative products to the market that
will aid our industry in all aspects
of pipeline locating, inspection
and rehabilitation. I am a big fan
of trenchless technologies in general, and there is always room for
improvement in the technologies
that serve our market.

Constants
Through all of my career twists and
turns, two things have remained
constant: the first, my family. My
wife Diana, daughter Brandi and
her husband Joe (who have three
children ranging in ages from one
to 17), son Sean (who is a NASSCO

scholarship recipient and currently
works designing water towers as a
structural engineer) and son Dillon, whom I mentioned above and
is running Specialty Trenchless
Products. My wife and children
have had to put up with a husband,
father, and now grandfather who
is required to be away from home
quite a bit. Without their love and
support, I would not be where I
am today.
The second constant in my career is the standards that NASSCO
has worked so hard to implement
in our industry. Through PACP
and the other programs they offer,
NASSCO has been, and continues
to be, a very valuable part of our
industry. Back in the 1990s, when
we were developing the Flexidata
software at Pearpoint, we found it
very difficult to create a standard
on our own. Everyone wanted
their own custom codes and no

one had any interest in any type of
consistent standard. Fortunately,
the visionaries who were members
at NASSCO saw a program being
used in England called WRc and
pushed for a similar standard here
in the States.
Even though some of the "Old
Guard" on the original PACP Committee were mostly interested in
creating handwritten forms, many,
like Marilyn Shepard and others,
saw the emergence of computer technology as key to what we
were trying to accomplish, and we
pushed hard for the development
of a PACP database that could be
exported by any compliant software system. This would allow for
any software to create a standard
export that could easily integrate
into another software system. This
is now the cornerstone of PACP
compliance.
As NASSCO regulates and certifies the individual software pro-

grams involved in this program,
it serves to simplify this process
for cities and contractors alike.
By design, anyone's software and
the resultant data collected during
a PACP inspection should be exportable in a PACP format and
imported directly in to any other
PACP-compliant software. This
saves contractors a considerable
amount of money and time, versus
the prospect of that contractor
having to own and understand
multiple software programs.
Occasionally you hear that
NASSCO has too much influence on our industry. Based on
my experience before the PACP
program, I believe that is a
good thing. In fact, my hope for
NASSCO is that the organization
continues to grow in influence,
encouraging all software manufacturers in our market to embrace full compliance which will,
in the end, benefit us all.

As a Quanta Services Company, Mears has access to the largest pool of
skilled workers, equipment and specialized services in the world, giving us
unique flexibility to serve our clients.

HORIZONTAL DIRECTIONAL DRILLING/DIRECT PIPE® SERVICES: River, road, and railroad crossings /
Shore approaches / Intersects / Installing steel, HDPE, and FPVC / Design/Build and EPC Services
Certified in Safety, Quality, and Environment: OHSAS 18001:2007, ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 14001:2004.
www.MearsHDD.net

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Underground Construction January 2018

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Underground Construction - January 2018

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