SIDE SCAN SONAR AIDS
KATRINA CLEAN-UP
Most
people have heard how hurricane Katrina ravaged
the city of New Orleans and devastated the gulf coast of
Mississippi. Mike
Collins of Destin, FL is one of the many people helping in the
clean-up effort. “I
couldn’t believe my eyes when I first arrived in Gulfport
and saw the damage”, Mike reported.
“The tallest thing you could see along the beachfront
were the cement slabs where homes once stood.
I saw trailers that were washed 4 miles inland.
People were living in tents.
The bridge to Port St. Louis looked like an atom bomb
had hit it. There
wasn’t a single piling along its three and a half mile span
that wasn’t damaged.”
Mike
has been very busy using his JW Fisher side scan sonar to
survey harbors and waterways around the city of Gulfport, MS.
When he began surveying it seemed there was no end to
the amount of debris littering the bottom.
There were boats of all sizes and shapes, cars, trucks,
pieces of trailer homes, and tons of other junk.
In the old days when storms hit and carried debris into
the waterways, salvagers would go out in boats and drag hooks
around. When the
hook grabbed onto something, it would be pulled from the
water. But in
aftermath of Katrina, there was so much junk strewn throughout
the waterways it would be far too time consuming to do it the
old way. A new
and better technology was needed to find the debris and mark
it’s location for removal.
This was one of the primary reasons officials made the
decision to bring in Mike and his side scan sonar.
"To
tow the side scan I brought over a trailerable catamaran.
It’s perfect for the shallow water of the harbor and
inland waterways. I
set the side scan on the 600K frequency and lowered the fish
just a few feet beneath the surface.
This worked perfect and gave me great images of the
bottom. You could
easily see how each target was laying.
The objective of the clean-up was to remove anything
that was larger than a 5 gallon bucket.
I would take the engineers out on my boat and drop a 5
gallon pail over the side with a buoy to the surface.
The engineer could see the bucket on the sonar and then
quickly determine if other objects were
larger or smaller. I ran grids so the navigation pilings along the edge of the
channel were visible in the sonar image.
This made it easy to determine exactly where the target
was laying."
In
a matter of a few weeks Mike completed 5 major survey jobs
including the submerged structure of the Highway 90 bridge,
Bay St. Louis Yacht Harbor, Pass Christian Harbor,
Long Beach Harbor, and the Grand Casino Harbor.
Officials were so pleased with the results they asked
him to come back after the clean-up and resurvey the area to
make sure the job is complete.”
For more information
on this project or their side scan sonars contact Christopher
Combs at JW Fishers Mfg. Inc., 1953 County St., East Taunton,
MA 02718, USA. Phone:
(800) 822-4744 or (508) 822-7330.
Fax: (508) 880-8949.
E-mail to jwfishers@aol.com or check out the web site
at www.jwfishers.com.
