Industry Insights

Two GPRS team members recently shared some of their knowledge of the utility locating and concrete scanning industry.Chris Moore, GPRS’ Senior Vice President of Internal Operations, spoke with ISHN Magazine’s chief editor Benita Mehta for a podcast.

In Huntsville, Alabama, a family of seven saw their house explode after an independent contractor struck a gas line while working in the area. And residents in one neighborhood in O’Fallon, Missouri, were forced to evacuate their homes numerous times over a months-long saga.

If you oversee a business or municipality’s water system, money could be leaking out of your pipes right this minute. When a leak occurs on an underground water or sewer line, severe damage can occur without any water ever reaching the surface.

GPRS located water, sewer, and irrigation lines at Comerica Park before the Detroit Tigers began moving the outfield wall to turn their 422-foot outfield to 412 feet.

This week-long event surrounds Global Surveyors Day on March 21, 2023, and is full of important educational and training events for surveyors and other construction and land use facility managers on the importance of surveys. 

When an excavator hits a utility line, everything stops. Work stops, progress stops, and depending on the severity of the strike, neighborhoods and communities can come to a standstill, and lives may be lost. That is why the One Call system became law in 2002.

For GPRS team members, no two days are the same and tomorrow always offers the opportunity for new challenges and growth. Larry Wade has found himself in some extraordinary situations over his eight years with GPRS, and he’s about to embark on a whole new chapter with the company.

It’s 2015, and GPRS Senior Project Manager William Johnson stands more than a mile below the Pennsylvania soil in a mine shaft. He’s completely alone, the light on his helmet barely holding his inky black surroundings at bay.

When construction veterans Doug Woods, Peter Nosler, and Ron Davidowski founded DPR Construction in 1990, they started with $750,000 in pooled resources and 11 employees working out of one office. 

President Biden just unveiled a $4 billion blueprint to update a 150-year-old rail tunnel in Maryland as the latest project in the federal government’s bid to overhaul U.S. concrete infrastructure.

Assessing concrete has previously relied on inherently unreliable methods for gathering information.The advent of 3D laser scanning has allowed contractors, inspectors, and designers to easily identify issues and reduce errors with millimeter-accurate data.

Located in Buena Park, California, just ten minutes from the Anaheim resort area, Knott’s started as an actual berry farm in the early 1920s. The property’s first expansion was a tearoom that quickly became a restaurant specializing in fried chicken.

Since its founding in 2001, GPRS has striven to be at the cutting edge of utility locating technology because what’s underneath matters – to your timeline, your budget, and your safety.

3D laser scanners are powerful instruments capable of mapping a space in exact 3D detail. The reality capture of buildings and sites delivers huge advantages for all kinds of construction and engineering projects from providing as-built site documentation, monitoring construction progress, and creating design models.

A TruView is a file used in portable software designed for easy and intuitive sharing of point clouds, design models, mark-ups and more. TruViews are 3-dimensional photographs overlaid on top of the point cloud data.

When ground penetrating radar (GPR) burst onto the scene decades ago, it quickly replaced X-ray as the preeminent tool for precision concrete scanning.

It’s not every day that GPRS investigates a nearly 175-year-old stone church to see if a historical treasure trove might be buried within its foundation.

It’s a type of pulmonary fibrosis - or scarring of the lungs – resulting from years of inhaling minuscule slivers of silica, a material commonly found in sand, quartz, and other types of rock used on construction sites across the globe.

Big underground water leaks and the devastating erosion they cause don’t appear out of thin air. When you see sensational news stories about sinkholes swallowing cars or whole houses, there were months, years, and even decades of water loss that either went undetected – or ignored – until it was too late. 

Cross bores such as this one are a deadly byproduct of trenchless technology. GPRS Video Pipe Inspections can help locate these dangerous subsurface anomalies before they cause injury or worse.

Point cloud data is the term used to refer to the data points collected for a given geographical area, terrain, building, or space. A LiDAR point cloud dataset is created when an area is laser scanned using LiDAR, or light detection and ranging.

The failing health of the country’s outdated waterworks is not a new problem. A Scientific American article penned back in 2016 noted that most of the water mains in the United States need to be upgraded or replaced after decades of exposure to corrosive soil has left them pitted or otherwise structurally compromised.

Data can be assessed on a computer in a 3D space, allowing clients to get a real view of the site without actually having to physically be there. Data is accurate, measurable, sharable, and editable. Custom deliverables, such as 2D CAD drawings and 3D BIM models can be created to bring clarity and resolution to project

GPRS/TruePoint 3D Laser Scanning Services make hyper-accurate as-builts, 2D CAD drawings, 3D BIM models and meshes, and interactive 3D walkthrough tours a reality for a wide variety of construction-related industries through our photogrammetry, LiDAR scanning, and visualization solutions.