Municipal Sewer & Water: Infrastructure Coverage for the People Who Maintain City Systems
Municipal Sewer & Water, known in its industry as MSW, is a trade magazine and online news source published by COLE Publishing in Eagle River, Wisconsin, for the professionals who keep municipal sewer, water and stormwater systems working. Available at mswmag.com, it serves municipal decision-makers, sewer and water directors, technicians and the private water and wastewater contractors who install, inspect, maintain and rehabilitate underground infrastructure. Where its sister title Pumper writes for private hauling contractors, MSW writes for the public works world: the utility that owns the pipes, the crew that cleans and televises them, and the contractor hired to reline them. Its coverage mixes municipal success stories, rehabilitation case studies, inspection technology, product news and practical maintenance guidance, published in a monthly magazine and in daily online exclusives for an industry whose work is mostly invisible until something fails.
Part of COLE Publishing's Water and Wastewater Family
MSW is owned and operated by COLE Publishing, Inc., a company established in 1979 in Wisconsin's Northwoods that describes itself as North America's largest publisher of print and digital magazines serving the water and wastewater industries. COLE's nine titles include Pumper, Cleaner, Municipal Sewer & Water, Treatment Plant Operator, Onsite Installer, PRO, Plumber, digDifferent and Gas, Oil & Mining Contractor. The publisher says its pride and success come from personal relationships maintained over more than forty years of working with colleagues in the business, shaping agendas in essential industries. That positioning matters for MSW's editorial approach. It is not a general engineering journal and not a policy magazine; it is a practitioner publication written for people who manage crews, budgets and buried assets. Being inside COLE's family also connects MSW's municipal readers to the wider workforce its sister titles serve, including the treatment plant operators who receive what the collection system delivers and the contractors who share the same trade shows and equipment suppliers.
Who MSW Serves: Directors, Crews and Contractors
The magazine defines its audience precisely: municipal decision-makers, sewer and water directors, technicians and private contractors engaged in installing, inspecting, maintaining and rehabilitating sewer, water and stormwater infrastructure. That audience spans the chain of responsibility for a city system. A director reads MSW for capital planning, regulatory strategy and peer experience in other cities. A collections supervisor reads it for cleaning, inspection and repair methods that can be applied on Monday morning. A contractor reads it for rehabilitation technologies and municipal market intelligence. A technician reads it for equipment capability and safety. MSW's editorial format serves all four at once by pairing each technology or method with a real municipal story: the city that had the problem, the data it collected, the approach it chose, and the result it measured. Operator spotlights and utility profiles give individual professionals visibility in a field where good work is, by design, unnoticed by the public it protects.
Inspection: Seeing Inside Buried Pipes
Pipeline inspection is one of MSW's most heavily covered subjects, because modern sewer management begins with knowing the condition of assets that cannot be seen from the surface. The magazine follows CCTV crawler systems, pole cameras for quick one-person inspections, smoke testing systems for locating leaks and inflow sources, and new robotic platforms. Recent coverage included a compact battery-powered inspection robot designed to bring professional crawler performance to mains and storm lines without a truck, generator or extra crew, and a self-propelled floating inspection robot for large, flooded or surcharged pipelines of 24 inches and above, capable of long deployments and of combining high-definition video with sonar and laser profiling. Guidance articles explain how to build a sewer inspection programme from little or no inspection history, how to conduct manhole inspections to best practice, and how mapping and documentation turn raw video into an effective maintenance programme. The editorial line is consistent: inspection data, properly managed, is the foundation for cleaning priorities, rehabilitation planning and defensible budgets.
Rehabilitation and Relining: Fixing Pipes Without Digging Them Up
Rehabilitation is the second pillar of MSW's coverage. American sewer and water pipes are aging, and replacing them by open excavation is disruptive and expensive, so the magazine reports extensively on trenchless and lining methods. Coverage includes cured-in-place pipe rehabilitation, spray-applied manhole lining systems, chemical grouting to stop infiltration, and water main rehabilitation techniques such as pulling thick-walled HDPE pipe through failing concrete mains to produce a leak-tight result with minimum surface impact. Case studies make the stakes concrete. In one recent feature, a village whose manholes had deteriorated under hydrogen sulfide corrosion was taking on 168,000 gallons a day of excess groundwater, overwhelming its lagoon system and risking federal violations; a phased programme of grouting and multi-layer manhole lining sealed the structures as a cost-effective alternative to full replacement. MSW also explains how components interact — how rehabilitating a pipe without its manhole can leave a watertight system leaking at the joint — teaching readers to treat the network as one system rather than a set of isolated repairs.
Cleaning, Jetting and Everyday Maintenance
Between inspection and rehabilitation lies the daily work of keeping lines open, and MSW covers sewer cleaning as a skilled trade in its own right. Articles examine high-pressure water jetting as a service and as an in-house capability, weighing the return on jetting equipment and the training crews need. Practical features explain the uses of pipe plugs for stopping flow, air testing and sewage bypass during maintenance and repairs, drawing distinctions that matter for safety and correct application. Seasonal guidance is a staple: late-summer storm sewer inspection, cleaning and maintenance checklists help municipalities recover from months of heavy rain and flash flooding and prepare for the next season. Coverage also follows the public face of maintenance, such as a San Antonio programme that turned a rescue story into a children's book teaching responsible disposal habits — a reminder that what residents flush and pour determines much of what collection crews must remove. MSW treats routine maintenance as the cheapest form of capital protection, and its how-to content is written to be clipped, shared and used by crews, not only managers.
Water, Stormwater and Emergency Response
Although sewer is first in its title, MSW's remit covers the full municipal water cycle. Its water coverage follows distribution system renewal, storage and treatment-adjacent infrastructure, including features such as a Fargo water tank named Tank of the Year for artistic value, community significance and project challenge. Stormwater coverage addresses inspection and maintenance of storm sewers, wet-weather flows and overflow prevention, with classic stories such as St. Petersburg's programme to nearly eliminate overflows through collections system maintenance. Emergencies test every system, and MSW reports them as industry news: when a 42-inch regional transmission main ruptured in Oakland County, Michigan, causing pressure drops and boil-water advisories across several communities, the governor declared a state of emergency, and MSW carried the story as part of its running record of main breaks and responses. For utility managers, these reports function as a shared incident log: what failed, how neighbouring systems were affected, and what the event suggests about the condition of similar infrastructure elsewhere.
Data, Mapping and Capital Planning
A defining theme in recent MSW coverage is the conversion of field data into financial decisions. Articles on sewer capital planning explain how to move from inspection data to risk modelling, so that limited rehabilitation budgets are spent where failure is most likely and most consequential. Asset mapping and inspection product coverage follows the software and hardware that connect GIS records, condition scores and work management. The magazine also publishes sceptical, reader-protective analysis, such as an examination of how bundled camera software packages can quietly limit a public works inspection programme — the kind of hidden-cost reporting that helps a supervisor defend an independent purchasing decision. Consent decrees, the court-supervised agreements under which many large systems must eliminate overflows, receive practical treatment focused on turning regulatory obligation into a manageable, sustainable programme through connected data. This emphasis reflects the audience's reality: directors must justify multi-million-dollar programmes to councils and ratepayers, and credible data, well documented, is the language in which that justification is made.
Workforce and the Next Generation of Utility Workers
Like the rest of the water sector, municipal utilities face a retiring workforce and difficulty recruiting technicians, and MSW reports workforce development as industry news. It covered, for example, a partnership between the State Technical College of Missouri and Vermeer Corporation to launch a Utilities Technology degree combining hands-on training with classroom instruction, designed to produce job-ready graduates for employers short of utility technicians. Operator and crew spotlights in the magazine serve a related purpose: they make municipal careers visible by showing the people who perform them and the progression from entry-level technician to supervisor and director. Product and technology coverage also reflects a labour-saving direction of travel, from one-person inspection systems to robots that work in flooded lines crews cannot easily enter. By treating recruitment, training and tool design as one workforce conversation, MSW speaks to directors whose most difficult asset-management problem is not a pipe but the shrinking pool of people qualified to maintain it.
Format: Monthly Magazine, Daily Website and Newsletters
MSW reaches readers through a monthly print magazine, a frequently updated website and email newsletters, with video issue previews introducing each month's infrastructure stories, technology updates and operator spotlights. Online exclusives appear between issues: product news round-ups detailing new inspection and rehabilitation equipment with full specifications, editors' selections of the most-read stories, and year-in-review collections that resurface the magazine's favourite reporting. Topic organisation online mirrors the field's own categories — inspection, surveying and mapping, rehabilitation and relining, cleaning, stormwater and water distribution among them — so a reader researching one problem can follow it across years of case studies. Registration for articles is free, consistent with COLE's controlled-circulation trade model in which a qualified professional audience is itself the product offered to advertisers. For a municipal supervisor in Eagle River's wider national readership, the combined package functions as continuing education: a steady, practical briefing on how other cities keep buried infrastructure working, delivered by a publisher that has covered the water and wastewater workforce since 1979.
