SAIC Helps Army Clean Moat at Fort Monroe

For seven days, a team of SAIC workers scoured the bottom of Fort Monroe as a part of an ongoing cleanup of the historic Army base. SAIC conducted a remedial investigation and feasibility study to find any discarded military munitions that could pose a risk to human health or the environment.

Overview

The U.S. Army will leave Fort Monroe and hand it over to Virginia in September 2011, as directed by the Base Realignment and Closure Commission. But before it does, it must ensure nothing dangerous — most important, live artillery — is left behind. So for the first time in 30 years, the military, with the help of SAIC, dug into the moat's muddy floor to see what was there.

SAIC did a bathymetric survey of the moat in June 2009 that included side-scan sonar and sub-bottom profiling (bouncing sound waves off the bottom to measure the depth of the water and detect objects) and the use of a gradiometer (to measure magnetic fields). This survey was used to characterize the sediment in the moat and determine whether there were any magnetic anomalies either on the surface of or within the sediment.

The data was then sent off to classify the magnetic signatures using the Multi-sensor Towed Army Detection System software, which SAIC developed in conjunction with the Navy under a Naval Research Laboratory contract. The geophysical analysis gave the team an idea of the shape of the anomalies and resulted in a list of 224 targets for the team to search.

Out in the moat, SAIC team members located anomalies with a Global Positioning System, then used a magnetometer to pinpoint the object. The SAIC team spent more than 10 hours a day for seven days in chest-deep water identifying and locating explosive hazards in Fort Monroe's moat. Once they had the precise location, they dug up objects stuck in the sediment.

After the successful clean-up of Fort Monroe of any live ammunition, SAIC also conducted a chemical analysis investigation and feasibility study to determine if the discarded military munitions posed a risk to human health and the environment, and they identified remedies to those risks.

Project Details

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