[space animation_iteration="1" height="20"][heading animation_iteration="1"]“Do You Have Control Over Your Underground Assets or Do They Have Control Over You?”[/heading]

Transparent, Proactive Asset Management

Today’s public works professional bears a new burden – transparency. Not only is all of internal municipal management watching your actions and spending closely, but so are your constituents. It has become very easy for anyone to access information about department budgets, spending, and overall fiscal responsibility. Historically, public works has always approached asset maintenance on extremely limited budgets, so proactive asset inventories and condition assessments were far too expensive to consider an option. Some advances have been made to video and scanning technologies for manhole, structure, and pump station assessments to stay ahead of asset degradation, but the results were not much better than “old school” assessments.

 

In 2018, GHA investigated the Cues SPiDER 3D scanner. We saw great potential, but it was simply not yet a valuable engineering tool. For over a year, GHA worked directly with Cues on a prototype, identifying potential improvements and improving accuracy. Through this partnership, a huge leap forward was made in efficient, accurate structure assessment.

[text animation_iteration="1"]Today, GHA’s services using the SPiDER and GIS are providing clients control over asset inventory and assessment never before imagined, while avoiding confined space entry issues entirely. The data collected is comprehensive, including high visibility video and point cloud data so complete that 3D modeling is hard to distinguish from video or stills. Among the advantages of possessing this data are more efficient maintenance expenditures, identification of old or abandoned pipes, pre- and post-rehabilitation comparisons, and clearly, avoiding catastrophic asset failure. This proactive awareness helps cut premium emergency repair costs by directing maintenance dollars to the assets in the most need, rather than addressing emergencies as they come up. Further, by identifying potential underground conflicts with future capital projects, the problem of costly redesigns is mitigated by superior initial design data.[/text][space animation_iteration="1"]
[text animation_iteration="1"]GHA developed this service line with risk reduction in mind. Proactively addressing these risks translates into lower maintenance costs, longer asset lifecycle, and more. The funds needed to reactively repair these issues often come from already-earmarked purposes, further forcing deferred maintenance, delayed capital projects…it’s a vicious circle. We have already identified an alarming number of manhole structure defects that, if assessed by more traditional means, would have been impossible to see and would have progressed unnoticed into further decline. The potential overall boost to cost savings, and avoiding unexpected loss of use or premature capital replacement is remarkable. Donald Leicht, Village of Kenilworth Public Works Superintendent, states, “Gewalt Hamilton Associates offers a very professional and easy to interpret structure assessment and evaluation report…We have used this service and the service is professional and precise…We are now able to plan our capital projects more effectively than in the past.” Ultimately, one of the most beneficial effects of GHA/SPiDER services is that it helps enable and supports the transparency being demanded through stronger data, elevated awareness and greater control.[/text][space animation_iteration="1" height="20"]

Put GHA's Underground Structure Scanning services to Work in your Organization!

FOR DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT IMPLEMENTATION OPTIONS, CONTACT:

Mike Grinnell - Senior Engineering Technician

Direct: 847.821.6282

MGrinnell@GHA-Engineers.com