When the Colorado Springs Downtown Partnership decided to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the AdAmAn Club, the local group responsible for facilitating the city’s iconic New Year’s Eve fireworks display, a plan was struck—to revitalize an alleyway in the heart of downtown Colorado Springs so that public art telling the club’s story could be installed.
Seeing an opportunity to address the need to update utilities downtown at the same time, Colorado Springs Utilities agreed to provide infrastructure upgrades. But it was no small feat when the alley in question was as old as the organization the project would commemorate.
“Colorado Springs Utilities is a four-service utility, and we knew all four utilities—gas, electric, water and wastewater—needed to be located and upgraded in the alley,” project manager Rockie Wiley told American Gas.
To safely accomplish these upgrades, LiDAR 3D scanning technology was used by the utility’s asset management and land surveying team to help create a fuller picture of what lay underground.
An early adopter of LiDAR, Colorado Springs Utilities has utilized the technology for about a dozen years. Initially used by the substation and transmission group to help meet regulations for wire heights, it has since become a valuable tool for all the utility’s services. The utility reported that the alley project confirmed the technology’s usefulness in determining how to tie into other existing underground lines.
According to Wiley, LiDAR works by shooting out wavelengths of light through potholes or trenches dug in the ground nearby. These pulses bounce off reflective surfaces, sending back data points that can be used to visualize the shape of underground objects with nearly exact measurements of the unseen or difficult-to-see items—in this case, cast-iron pipe installed in 1911 and 500 feet of clay wastewater pipe installed in 1888.
“It was very useful during construction because we were able to compare the LiDAR imagery to what we were digging up,” Wiley said. “It’s especially helpful in older sections of town where there are a lot more unknowns.”
Ultimately, 700 feet of new plastic gas main was installed, including a two-way feed to reduce the probability of outages in the area. In addition, a new water main, telecommunications infrastructure and more than 5,400 feet of new electric cable were also installed.
The AdAmAn Alley project had a grand opening just before the annual New Year’s Eve fireworks. —Eric Johnson