“There are agencies working very hard on aspects of Engineering With Nature, particularly right now and particularly with coastal environments,” he said, adding that a significant application of this work is reflected in R&D work being done “to support the Corps of Engineers North Atlantic Division in the restoration efforts following 2012’s Superstorm Sandy.”
ERDC’s support to the North Atlantic Division also leveraged technologies previously developed following 2005’s Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast.
“We have brought all of our modeling capabilities up to the Atlantic corridor to be able to very, very accurately model wind, waves, the interaction between wind and waves and surge, and how each of those elements operates together to give us higher and higher levels of flood potential in various parts of the country,” Holland said.
… one of the most impressive things about ERDC is the breadth of what we do.”
In another civil works example, Holland highlighted recent developments that have exploited ERDC’s expertise in advanced technologies and material sciences to help understand when the gates on a navigational lock might be approaching failure.
“When you are going up and down river systems that have locks and dams on them for navigation, failure of those lock gates is basically tantamount to closing down that portion of the river to navigation,” he explained. “It’s tough to have to dewater and to get the gates ‘in the dry’ to actually replace them. But the Corps of Engineers has had to do that in places over the last several years. So our goal is to find a way to monitor those things and to ‘throw flags up’ to the lock operators to tell them when they have a problem, when they are approaching a problem, or if all is well.”
He described a solution that combines the use of remotely accessible sensor packages with high-fidelity modeling to provide a predictive mode that automatically sends status messages to lock operators or USACE district offices to allow necessary repairs to be scheduled and made “prior to a crisis mode situation.”
ERDC has also been applying its expertise in computing and mobile technologies to convert smartphones into civil works sensors.
Holland offered the example of “blue roof management,” named for the blue tarps that are often placed on damaged roofs following damaging storms.
“When we went through Hurricane Katrina, we found that often it could take several weeks to process requests for home repair assistance,” he said. “That’s several weeks of rainwater getting into your house or people not being able to live under their roofs. So we have developed a capability around a normal cellphone where people can go in, tell where they live, and fill out a simple form. That form then goes up and over to someone like FEMA, where it is used to assign an inspector who can quickly verify the problem and begin assistance. We think that we have taken something that formerly took several weeks and turned it into something that can take a few days.”
ERDC researchers work with Tulsa District field engineers at Newt Graham Lock and Dam, near Inola, Oklahoma, during maintenance and repair operations. One of ERDC’s core areas of research and development is Civil Works and Water Resources. Photo by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
The same base technology was used to support levee evaluations during the 2011 great flood on the lower Mississippi River and the Missouri River, where photographs of levee imperfections were reported directly to USACE offices that immediately assigned crews to repair the problem.
Holland added that several hundred of those devices have also been used in support of Hurricane Sandy recovery.
“We use those technologies in pilot form now, but they are ready to be used full time, as soon as the Army is able to move them from a pilot status to a full production status,” he said.
Other recent ERDC accomplishments featured biologists and ecologists working with resource agencies “inside the fences” of military installations to protect threatened and endangered species while maximizing available training lands.
“I think one of the things that surprises people the most about ERDC is the fact that the Corps of Engineers’ research and development organization has become so central to the Army’s warfighter mission over the last [few] years,” he concluded. “In fact, one of the most impressive things about ERDC is the breadth of what we do.”
This article first appeared in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: Building Strong®, Serving the Nation and the Armed Forces 2014-2015 Edition.