Capturing the Bluestone Dam
The Bluestone Damon the New River in West Virginia was completed in 1952. It’s 165 feet high above the stream bed and about 2,000 feet long, and it has 21 flood gates. Any way you look at it, it’s impressive.
As part of an ongoing safety assurance program, the Huntington District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), which operates the dam, has been collecting detailed data on it and plans to have a complete 3D model of it by the end of 2015.
Currently, USACE is drilling through the dam and putting in pre-stressed steel anchors. The project is generating an enormous amount of construction and design data, including soil borings and geological studies. This gave rise to the need for a plan to manage the data. The scans and surveys will make it possible to build a 3D database to do so.