EXPERIENCE

Brian Abbott refers to his infrastructure work as his “bread and butter,” yet he also does a lot of archeological work. In fact, Abbott just recently returned from Virginia where he was looking at shipwrecks from the Battle of Yorktown, the last battle of the American Revolution. Abbott surveys a lot of shipwrecks. He’s captured sonar images from Civil War battles, primarily ironclads, and searched the James River looking for forts or ships that may have been scuttled by the Confederacy during the war. Since 2014, he has also assisted in the search for World War II MIA (missing in action) servicemen throughout the Pacific. “The objective is to find a missing plane, tank, or landing craft underwater,” he says, “so I pack up the sonar gear, fly to an island battle site like Yap, Kwajalein, or Tarawa, where there alone we found twelve different tanks or landing craft underwater that could possibly hold the remains of Marines. It’s a very humbling experience to see these guys who disappeared in 1943 still there. In my world, they need to be brought home. It’s very emotional. There is some family member out there who wonders what happened to their uncle, brother, father, or grandfather, that they still care about. I was out there this year for three weeks looking for fighter planes and B24 bombers. We stop once we find the plane. If we find a component with a serial number on it, we determine who that plane belonged to and that person can be moved from MIA to KIA (killed in action). We don’t excavate remains. We just locate the target and turn it over to the authorities. They can sift through sand, clay and mud and still do genetic testing of one or numerous individuals.” There are still missing Gato class submarines (each with crews of over 60 crew members) as well as lost troop transport ships. In the 20th century alone, from World War I through Vietnam, there remain 80,000 American MIAs—58,000 of those from World War II.

According to Abbott, in many cases underwater structures are “out of sight, out of mind.” For bridges, federal highway laws mandate inspection above the waterline every two years, but below water, only every five. When I ask why, Abbott admits that even he doesn’t have a good answer. “You can go five or ten years without inspecting a bridge underwater,” he laments. “To be blunt, America’s infrastructure is falling apart. Many things are past their design life and that’s why our highway systems are not in good shape. The problem is where will we get the money to repair these? As taxpayers, we all have an interest in good roads and bridges, but then not everyone wants to pay the high amount of taxes because we’re not talking hundreds of millions, we’re probably talking trillions to fix the whole infrastructural system.” Unless they have been hit, Abbott assures that, for the most part, bridges are safe, based on the terms functionally deficient, and structurally obsolete. He illustrates his explanation using an old BOXX computer. “If I had a 2002 BOXX, it would be functionally obsolete in today’s world. That doesn’t mean it’s in bad shape or isn’t going to work. It’s just that the technology has passed it by so much that it doesn’t operate as well as it should. It’s not meeting today’s standards. So, it doesn’t mean that bridge will fall down or isn’t safe to drive across. It just means it’s not meeting current standards. The same goes for dams, ports and harbors, We move so much by shipping and rail around the world and I think people would really be amazed on how much gets transported across our infrastructure systems. It’s massive. State DOTs are not really funded as they should be in order to make repairs, upgrade, or build completely new systems. Everything is based on the gas tax and in some states, gas is more expensive because you’re paying the higher tax. Are they repairing the brides, dams, harbors, and ports from these tax dollars? I don’t know. A lot of times that money ends up in the general fund instead of allocating it to the DOTs.”

Brian will receive a call from a client, who in this case, is responsible for a dam. They’re worried about some aspect of the structure, maybe some undermining or they just want it inspected underwater. Abbott submits a proposal for a crew of two or three. He may need a boat, maybe a crane. Once approved, he’s out on the job for one to five days equipped with up to three different types of sonars and his GoBOXX laptop equipped with a four-core Intel® Core™ i7-6700K processor (4.0GHz) 64GB of RAM, NVIDIA Quadro GPU, 64GB of RAM, and 1 TB SSD. He’ll go across the dam, and take sonar images of all the bottom walls, (or if it’s a bridge pier wall, a vertical plane, and the bottom plane too).

The sonar device is completely tethered and it’s been as deep as 12,000 feet. In that instance, it must be carried by a certain type of vehicle capable of traveling to that depth (for reference, as much as seven miles of cable). If it’s on a boat, it’s attached with some sort of deployment mechanism, or what Abbotts refers to as “The Holy Grail.” The grail in question mounts the sonar in a particular position so if Abbott wants to view the bottom of a river bed he will mount it on a tripod. If he needs to look at the walls, he can point the sonar in that direction in order to see the wall. He can tow it if necessary. There are even types of sonar that can be mounted to your boat, so you fly around. This multi-beam process is commonly referred to as “mowing the grass.”

Abbott’s sonar projects also require stellar GPS systems, which can get him within 3-5 feet of the structure. Sometimes he needs higher accuracy, which demands real-time kinematic (RTX) GPS for centimeter accuracy. “There’s a lot that comes into play with this,” he says. “Think of shining a flashlight straight down into the water from a rocking boat. That beam of light is going all over the place. The boat uses a motion reference unit (MRU) attached to the sonar system and it compensates for all these types of movements. The MRU receives constant updates every second as it tries to keep the equipment still.

You can mount as many as eight sonars on the underwater remotely operated vehicles, some of which are designed to go full ocean depth. At 20,000 feet, these sonar images, traveling over cable, arrive on the GoBOXX in real-time. “I need a good computer that can handle all this type of information,” says Abbott. “I have satellite uplinks coming in, I have this motion reference unit taking all these calibrations and constantly updating, I have sonar data coming in, and, dependent upon the system, additional information. The better the system I have, I can connect these components and it’s easier for the computer to read. If you go out to a particular store and buy a $350 laptop, chances are it’s not going to be able to handle a lot of the systems you’re connected to. That’s why I fell in love with BOXX. For eight years, I have not had a problem between the external components and the computer. Everything works well together. It’s like commercial diving. The last thing you want to worry about is your diving gear. Diving isn’t what you do, diving is a mode of transport to the worksite. That’s what the computer is to me. It’s a mode of transport for me to get the data and information. The client doesn’t care what I use, they just want to see pretty images. But In order to get that, I need all the good peripheral and cornerstone components put together.” Abbott carries a GoBOXX laptop on-site at all times. “It’s my go-to tool,” he says.

For post-work, Abbott relies on a 3DBOXX 8920, a 2013 dual Intel® Xeon® workstation now replaced in the BOXX model line up with machines like the APEXX X3 (overclocked, 18-core Intel Core X-series processor and NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000) and the flagship APEXX S3 (overclocked Intel Core i7 and NVIDIA Quadro RTX). Every day of fieldwork requires at least 2-3 days of post-processing, so a week on-site equals two weeks of post-processing in his home office to create what is typically 2D and 3D images along with a written report. Recently, Abbott completed a ten-page report (filled with 150 figures) looking for structural defects in a tunnel. “Each two-foot interval I took a sonar image,” he says. “I have to figure out how to display that image to the client so they can understand what that is and what they’re getting as an end product. When I send it, it’s usually an electronic copy via Google Drive or Dropbox. This report was 4.5 GB.”