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After a very successful pilot program in 2019, Fairfax County created a permanent program, Operation Stream Shield, in early 2020 to remove litter reaching the county’s waterways. Originally developed to reduce the amount of litter reaching the county’s waterways and riparian zones in accordance with the county’s Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) permit, the county has formed a partnership between the Department of Public Works and Environmental Services and the Office to Prevent and End Homelessness to utilize the county’s residents experiencing homelessness to not only remove litter but manage invasive species, conduct general landscaping and complete other special projects as needed. The MS4 Coordination Section coordinates with internal and external agencies to focus on workforce development pathways that provide homeless shelter clients with opportunities to develop knowledge and skills to participate in a diverse economy and earn income to support themselves. Homeless residents who excel in the program are provided with an opportunity to apply for full-time, non-merit positions within the county that serve as stepping stones to a full-time, merit county career.
ASCE’s new Standard Guideline for Recording and Exchanging Utility Infrastructure Data (the utility “as-installed” standard) is about to roll out. The standard provides a framework for improving management practices of public rights-of-way (ROW), especially considering changes in our midst with regard to electric and autonomous vehicles becoming more prevalent, 5G small cell installation, and smart city/road initiatives. These technologies will be vying for space in an already congested and mostly unknown underground landscape. Currently, the lack of management of our ROWs underground has turned it into a confusing mess. Records are often non-existent or based on relative positions to features no longer present. There is tremendous potential to improve the efficiency and usage of our roadways for the future that is rapidly approaching. The challenges in maximizing the use of ROW for smart roadways and increased infrastructure needs are complex and dynamic. Critical to addressing one challenge is it to understand and manage the facilities that are currently underground and new installations that are taking place every day. Maximizing the value of mapping what’s below the ROW will only come through the use of standards and best practices within organizations that install utilities in the ROW and agencies that manage the ROW. Given the right policies, standards, collaboration, and management practices, today’s technologies can enable us to easily create a real-time 3D picture of buried utilities. During this session, presenters will discuss the new standard, new technologies for collecting utility location data, and provide a live example of what the Montana and Texas DOTs are doing to start to proactively manage their public ROW; especially the utility infrastructure within their ROW.
Providing tools and technology that empowers your workforce and enables them to get the job done but provide real time reporting and tracking for asset, maintenance management, and timekeeping is essential. One large county agency has done just that with deployment of tools to keep their maintenance workforce in the field using mobile devices that let them inspect, repair, and track work done on the county’s valuable assets and feed real data back to supervisory and management staff as well as time tracking and financial data. Tools also include mapping and GPS to update assets and maintenance records easily as well as provide important asset data in the hands of maintenance personnel.
As cities and communities work to recover from historic adversities, it is time to rethink how we live, work, and consume. Using technology to become more sustainable, fiscally responsible, and less wasteful is imperative going forward. Resilient cities will be those that efficiently and successfully implement technologies that help transition current practices to ones capable of a renewed or reimagined push towards resilience. Having worked with many cities across the country, presenters are acutely aware of the operational pain-points and cost challenges being faced. Solutions must be designed to address the specific challenges of municipal fleets and help them uncover taxpayer savings and more sustainable solutions. These solutions must deliver on the goals commonly outlined by city partners. They must be customizable and adaptable utilizing the latest technology like machine learning and artificial intelligence that generates insights and achieve improvements in key operational areas. If these technologies can be used to optimize the many vehicles delivering food, it can be used to optimize a fleet of vehicles on our city streets and gather valuable data in the process. A garbage truck can become a part of this larger technology and data-driven solution. The garbage truck effectively collects waste, but there are more than four million miles of roadways across the US and a number of problems exist. Issues like snow and ice, potholes, abandoned houses and storefronts, buildings covered in graffiti, and damaged street signs all create issues for our communities. Harnessing technology can proactively deal with these issues and create better, safer, and cleaner streets without adding more personnel to government budgets and more equipment to our already congested streets. By equipping existing government fleets with the right technology, it transforms a city service model from reactive to proactive, making our technology work harder and build city resiliency.
The Tiny Trees program has successfully distributed 20,000 trees into Des Moines city in the short space of 3 years. Tiny Trees uses volunteers, and a unique drive up system, that has been fine-tuned over the last 3 iterations. The following presentation will provide a blueprint to which any city can replicate the same results. Many cities around the glove must contend with large weather events, growing and increasing the urban forest is a solid investment in mitigating many modern problems such cities face (water interception, heat islands, social equity…etc). The City of Des Moines is a flood and snow city, so increasing our urban canopy plays an integral part of our long term future proofing strategy. Using the local DNR nursery, an ordering system is set up where the public can order up to 5 trees for private use. As much as this program increases the urban canopy, it is also a huge educational program, bringing the urban forest into many citizens thoughts and lives. The city has managed to bridge a gap by providing 5 trees, for free, to any homeowner in the city. Normally, the DNR sells orders in minimum quantities of 100 trees. The citizen wins, and the city also wins due to increased canopy growth. Although this is run through the forestry division, Tiny Trees involves many divisions and is broadcast for many months prior. The feel-good effect of this program is massive, with citizens asking and anticipating the event many months in advance. The event also involves many volunteers, from nonprofits to large companies, with anywhere from 50 to 100 volunteers working throughout the event. It is hard to find a city run event that touches so many different groups, and provide green infrastructure at such a low price. This presentation with give an overview, some interesting stories, robust statistical numbers and the tools to start putting it all together should another city want to replicate Des Moines City Tiny Trees.
Over time, new pavements deteriorate due to the effect of traffic loads and the environment. If appropriate treatments are applied during the early stages of deterioration, it is possible to keep good roads good with minimal investments, instead of performing costly rehabilitation treatments later in the pavement’s life when the structure has deteriorated. Pavement preservation includes preventive maintenance, minor rehabilitation (non-structural), as well as some routine maintenance activities. Pavement preservation activities are intended to restore the function of the existing system and extend its service life, not increase its capacity or strength. Benefits associated with the implementation of a pavement preservation program include life extension of the existing pavement, lower treatment costs, reduced user costs, improved safety to the public and the workforce, improved overall network health, environmental benefits such as reduced air pollution and noise during construction, and sustainability. While there is a wide variety of treatments available, new and emerging technologies also continue to be added to the treatment toolbox. Understanding the applicability of each treatment and potential benefits that can be obtained is key for pavement managers who wish to implement a pavement preservation program.
This presentation explains what Reality Capture is and demonstrates various strategies and uses for it on different engineering projects. Capturing existing conditions can be a challenge. Sometimes traditional field measuring is the correct application for what is needed. However, this method is time-consuming and often requires additional trips back to the project site, which is not cost-effective. The benefits of Reality Capture include efficiency, economy, quality, and safety advantages. Tools covered in this presentation include high definition 3D laser scanners, multi-stations with scanning capabilities, mobile LiDAR, UAV, and structured light technology. These tools can be implemented on such applications as transportation-related projects, volume calculations, irregular surface feature delineation, as-built locations, MEP mapping, and structural failures. The presentation focuses on the various reality capture tools and methods, the advantages and limitations of each, and deliverable options. Presenters will also look at sample project datasets. The goal is to help participants better understand these technologies and their capabilities and see applications in their own projects.
When utilities discover exceedances over the EPA’s Action Level for lead and/or copper under the Lead and Copper Rule, they find themselves faced with public communication challenges that if mishandled, could permanently harm their reputations. Why? Because the water industry is still feeling the negative impacts from what happened in Flint, Michigan. What happened in Flint was not the typical lead exceedance under the Lead and Copper Rule; it was a violation of the public trust on multiple levels. However, for the average customer, Flint has become shorthand for any water quality situation a utility may face, especially if a lead and/or copper exceedance is involved. Throughout the last two years, WaterPIO has been handling the public communications involving lead exceedances for multiple water utilities. Some of the utilities provide multiple cities with their water supply, so the communications effort requires significant, coordinated cooperation between several jurisdictions to ensure the public was properly informed. For several of the utilities, their initial EPA Action Level exceedances required public notification and the immediate institution of corrosion control programs. Presenters will discuss how they designed the communications efforts to focus on the positives surrounding the situations, i.e. the fact the Lead and Copper Rule worked as designed. Lead and/or copper exceedances are not one-time communications matters; several they are dealing with are still ongoing. However, thanks to successful communications plans that detail the positive steps being taken by the utilities to resolve the exceedances, coverage by the news media has been informational and correct, and there has been little anger from customers. The presentation walks through the public information strategies used to provide perspective during lead exceedances and detail the messaging that resulted in thoughtful, reasoned reactions from the press and the public.
Rehabilitation of sewer systems under existing roadways and near existing buildings is a challenge. Some projects cannot be done in a trenchless fashion. When open excavation access is required, just the process of getting to the underground workspace becomes a major problem. Municipalities and property owners do not want large, over-excavated areas. As sewer systems are typically the deepest utility, the question of how to maneuver around shallower electrical, mechanical and telecomm systems becomes a concern. Adjacent property owners do not want other utilities cut or disconnected. Driving sheeting can be an option, but the damage caused by vibrating sheeting into place creates its own set of problems. The risk of severing mismarked lines comes into play, and those damages can be more than just an inconvenience to a property owner. When a city in southern California needed sewer outfall rehabilitation work done 23’ deep, in the middle of a street in a residential area, the contractor was tasked with doing the work without creating other problems discussed before. The specifications allowed for extreme minimal deflection in the shoring system. The 12’ x 12’ x 23’ excavations had to allow for crossing utilities. Conventional trench box or slide rail systems would not accommodate the crossing utilities which resided at much shallower elevations. This session is centered on how the contractor used a relatively new concept in shoring to access the site, meeting the strict deflection tolerances, while allowing the contractor to avoid disruption of crossing utilities. Presenters will also discuss how the contractor dealt with restrictions in the tabulated data. The shoring system used allowed the owner and contractor to work with less disruption, less soil reinstatement, and less paving restoration, all while meeting the engineering criteria and the requirements of OSHA.
The PPT will offer an introduction to the City of Dublin, Ohio as well as the cities snow and ice response plan known as SnowGo. We will discuss how to create a positive interaction with all municipal divisions for a 360 degree response to snow and ice events. Planning, preparations and execution of the SnowGo plan from preseason training events to end of season celebration. The PPT will also include equipment and material information used by the community. We will also share a remedy to preventing aggregate and debris being transferred from brine makers to holding tanks and then to trucks rendering the on-board wetting systems inoperative. We have found a tool to aid in preventing this!