A small civil-trades shop on the second floor of a former auto-body garage.

§ I · Founding

2007 — Al Reuter took the lease on a vacant cinder-block bay on Niagara, between the Sunoco at Hertel and the Texaco at Forest.

He had been a master plumber at Cellino Plumbing for eighteen years, the last seven of them running the underground crew. He had read the late-1990s NASSCO manuals on cured-in-place rehabilitation and had watched the technology cross over from large-diameter municipal mains to residential laterals. The bet he made — that a Buffalo housing stock dominated by 1895–1935 vitrified-clay laterals would have a multi-decade rehabilitation tail — has held up. The first six years, the shop was Al, a CCTV truck, and a phone book. He took 412 jobs in 2008. He took 1,068 in 2014.

§ II · Partnership

2014 — Marie Knapp joined as partner and brought the engineering discipline.

Marie is a UB '11 civil-engineering graduate who spent two years at Arcadis on the Niagara River wastewater interceptor project, then two years at the Buffalo Sewer Authority on long-term control plan modeling. She came to Reuter to do casework that closed inside one calendar week instead of one calendar decade. She brought with her a habit, learned from BSA: every job becomes a numbered dossier with a survey, a scope of work, a method statement, a cost breakdown, a sign-off, and a 12-month follow-up note. The casebook on this site is hers.

§ III · The crew

2017–2024 — six more people, three of them PACP-certified, two of them apprentices completing the Local 22 program.

The bench right now is Al (founder, master plumber), Marie (partner, civil engineer, casebook), Dani Okonkwo (lead operator, pipe-bursting), Seth Burczyk (lateral locator and CCTV), Linda Pham (operations and dispatch), Ari Ostrowski (apprentice, year three), Marco Ruzzini (apprentice, year one), and Charlie the office dog (Brittany spaniel, never on site). Bios are at /crew/. We are at the point where the bench is the right size to handle the cases we want and to run two truck-and-rig pairs simultaneously without burning anyone out.

§ IV · The work, as we choose to define it

Trenchless first. Open-cut second. Walk away third.

About 78% of the cases we close use one of the two trenchless methods — CIPP lining or pipe bursting. About 14% are spot repairs with a single open-cut access pit. About 6% are full open-cut replacements where trenchless cannot be safely or economically applied, usually because of a fully collapsed pipe, a foundation entry whose host wall is unreliable, or a connection geometry that exceeds the bursting head's tolerance. About 2% of the cases that come to us are jobs we don't take — most often because what the customer needs is a different trade entirely (a basement waterproofer, a foundation contractor, an HVAC technician chasing a condensate complaint), and we route them.

We refuse work for three reasons. First, when the lateral is sound and a customer has been told otherwise by another contractor — we will produce a CCTV survey that says so and we will not invent a recommendation. Second, when the budget the customer has and the work the lateral needs do not meet — we will say so and we will not take the deposit and start digging hoping the math will work out later. Third, when we cannot warranty the result honestly because the host pipe geometry is past the limits of the method — a CIPP liner installed across a 25% offset will fail, and we will not be the crew that takes the customer's $7,000 to install one.

§ V · Pricing posture

We post the ranges. We don't quote final without a survey.

The pricing table on the home page and on every method page is the same range we'll quote against on a phone call. The CCTV survey is a flat $385 — refunded against any job we close inside 60 days. Final number lives within $300 of the survey-day estimate on more than 91% of the dossiers we have closed since 2020 (Marie tracks this; the data lives in the casebook). When the survey reveals a complication that pushes the work outside the original range, we stop and call before we proceed; we do not generate a change order at the end of the day.

§ VI · The site you are reading

Every page is a real document with real sources cited.

This site reads like a public-works project archive because that's how Marie keeps the casebook. Every method has its own page with the standard, the equipment, the conditions, and the alternatives. Every failure mode in the camera survey has a labeled diagram and a real photograph. Every closed job is a numbered dossier. Every claim about Buffalo Sewer Authority procedure or NYS Department of Health rules is footnoted to the actual document — not summarized from memory and not hallucinated. The Standards page is the central bibliography. Read the Colophon if you want to know how the site itself was built.

If something on the site is wrong, write to dispatch@reuterknapp.example with the page URL and the correction. We post errata on the colophon and we date them.