INNOVATION July-August 2015

2014 ¢

2015 PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS

Cougar Creek Project In the early hours of June 21, 2013, Canmore residents were awoken by a raging Cougar Creek. Heavy rainfall pulled the lingering alpine snowpack towards the valley bottom along otherwise docile creeks. This particular 1.6 kilometer section threatened hundreds of homes. The following winter, after an intensive design period, Bremner Engineering and Construction was awarded the contract to restore the creek banks and the confidence of residents. The company led value engineering initiatives during the tender period, proposing articulated concrete mats (ACMs) as an economical, high-performance means of reinforcing the creek banks. During four cold winter months, crews moved more than 100,000 cubic meters of earth, manufactured and placed more than 3,600 ACMs, and

installed 33,000 cable clips to connect the ACMs. Owner: Town of Canmore. Design engineers: BGC Engineering, ISL Engineering and Land Services. Contractor: Bremner Engineering and Construction. Project manager: William Doyle, P.Eng. ACM manufacturer: International Erosion Control Systems. Photo: William Doyle.

Sechelt Water Resource Centre The District of Sechelt’s new Water Resource Centre incorporates the Organica “Fed Batch Reactor,” a unique enhancement to sequencing batch reactor treatment that uses living plants suspended above the bioreactors. The plant roots hang in the wastewater, creating a submerged attached growth medium, and greater biodiversity of microflora. Because the District is committed to reusing as much of the effluent as possible, ultraviolet light was incorporated for disinfection and ultrafiltration after biological treatment. The effluent discharge results are exceeding contract requirements and meet the Ministry of Environment “Indirect Potable Reuse” category for reclaimed water. The site was turned into a public park, providing a valuable asset for Sechelt’s downtown core. Owner: District of Sechelt. Design builder: Maple Reinders (Andrew Ambrozy, P.Eng.; Cameron Morris, EIT). Primary consultant/design partner: Urban Systems (Chris Town, P.Eng.; Jeremy Clowes, P.Eng.). Structural: CWMM Consulting Engineers (Mike Naylor, P.Eng.). Technology provider: Veolia Water Technologies Canada. HVAC: HPF Engineering (Darrell Miller, P.Eng.). Electrical: IITS (Bill Nestor, P.Eng.). Architectural: Public. A newly-designed stationary ice-penetrating radar system was deployed in July 2014 next to an ice-marginal lake known to drain annually in a subglacial jökulhlaup. Adaptive trigger, power management, and scheduling routines were implemented in software to perform stacked measurements every four hours. The radar operated autonomously for seven weeks, performing nearly a million single-shot acquisitions until retrieval. Data showed a dramatic decrease in internal ice reflections in synchronicity with the sudden drainage. Both lake level proxy obtained with a pressure sensor in the lake, and pictorial evidence, reinforced the validity of the radar signature. It demonstrates the system’s ability to detect temporal changes in englacial properties, and its initial robustness in a first deployment. Further applications include the monitoring of deep ice basal conditions, as well as shallower ice bodies such as ice-shelves and ice islands. The ice-penetrating radar system was developed by APEGBC member Laurent Mingo, P.Eng., of Blue System Integration.

Stationary Ice-Penetrating Radar System

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