Mobile IMS—Just What Governor Printz Needed

When a 72-inch Storm Sewer is sandwiched between a sewer and high-pressure gas lines, what could go wrong? Throw in soft ground, irregular rock surface, past litigation, interstate highway nearby, residents losing access to a major thoroughfare and you have a recipe for disaster. The designers of this pipeline project realized this and required extensive monitoring during construction. As a contractor, these are costs that don’t help you get the job done. For IMS, it was an opportunity to save the day.

Monitoring included groundwater levels, surface and subsurface settlement points, inclinometers for lateral movement detection, crack monitoring, and tilt meters on the excavation bracing system. According to the specification, all of this was to be in place before the contractor did any work in the area and was to be monitored nearly continuously while working with submission of daily data reports and alert level incident reports. Recognizing the extensive labor demands of manually monitoring such a system and the obvious staging of a linear project such as this, the automated capabilities of IMS were implemented to move a package of remotely monitored tools along with the contractor’s progress.

This remote package complimented other manual devices and allowed for installation of Measurand SAA devices in manual inclinometer tubes to measure ground deflection, electronic tiltmeters to measure tilt of the flexible SOE system, and piezometers to measure water levels as work progressed, thus obtaining the real time data continuously without the labor costs. The remote system was integrated with the sensemetric THREAD IIOT edge devices in a “portable package.” Data, alerts, and reports were shared with the owner’s representatives through Schnabel’s IMS system.