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CatchAll Environmental: Your Stormwater Managers
You’ve probably met Jim Winskill or Erin Brewster at a WMFHA event in the past year. But did you ever stop to find out how Catchall Environmental can help save your properties money by maintaining your stormwater systems? Preventative maintenance now could save you a big headache in the future…
What is the patented “The Catch-All” stormwater drain solution?
It is a filter basket we designed that fits into the bottom of each catch basin and captures all the sediment. This allows us to pull out the sediment without having to use a Vactor truck, reducing the cost of maintenance.
Why is it important for multifamily communities to keep their stormwater drains clean?
Backed up storm drains can affect all multi-family community residents. We get more emergency calls from multifamily properties experiencing storm flooding than any other property type.
In addition, sediment is an environmental pollutant. Cities and counties require stormwater systems to be maintained annually to minimize storm borne pollutants from entering the environment, and they enforce this with inspections and fines.
How does being proactive about clean drains save your customers money?
Taking care of your system upstream helps to prevent maintenance downstream. Servicing dirty storm ponds, detention vaults and pipes can be extremely expensive. The more you keep up with drains on the front end, the less you have to maintain the costly structures downstream.
Emergency flooding service is expensive and very stressful. The cost of keeping your stormwater system clean and maintained pales in comparison to the potential property damage and inconvenience to tenants in a preventable flooding event.
There are also municipal programs that act as incentives to keeping your stormwater drain clean. We frequently help to qualify our clients for utility credits and rebates in various cities and counties. This helps to further reduce overall operating costs.
When and how did you enter the multifamily market?
It was a natural connection from the beginning of the business. Multifamily communities have a lot of catch basins and potential for flooding, so once our name was out there, we started hearing from a lot of multi-family communities. Through things like organizational partnerships and events, that relationship has only grown over the past decade.
Who are your competitors? What is it that gives Catchall a competitive edge?
There are a lot of companies with Vactor trucks to suck up the muck, but they don’t have a specialty. They are simply doing cleaning but not doing maintenance.
"We have competitors, but we provide a unique solution they don’t."
Property managers have very reactive jobs and juggle many tasks at a time, so it’s important to have a system in place that ensures that storm drains stay clean and free of pollutants. Our maintenance program takes the stress of stormwater flooding and compliance requirements off the property manager’s plate. We also communicate with their municipalities on their behalf. We do this proactively, so fines, floods and property damage don't occur.
The bottom line is property managers get to have a system that drains like it’s supposed to, and stays in municipal compliance year-round. With something they can “set and forget”, they get to be environmental heroes and save money on their overall stormwater maintenance over time.
What is the sexiest thing about stormwater maintenance to you?
Property managers get to own being an environmental steward, with very little cost. Catchall Environmental gets to provide solutions for a problem that can be extremely ugly when it occurs. Plus, it is unexpectedly satisfying to see a catch basin being cleaned out and stagnant water pollution cleared away!
