If you were in Battleford this Labour day weekend, you might have seen a white van going around the town’s streets with the letters “ARAN” on the side.
That is short for Automatic Road Analyzer, the equipment used in the assessment being conducted by consultants Catterall and Wright on the condition of the roads throughout the town.
Catterall and Wright partnered with Fugro Roadware Inc. on the project, with Fugro providing the ARAN vehicle to collect data from the approximately 71 kilometres of streets in the community.
The vehicle uses ground-penetrating radar to assess road thickness underneath, and it also uses cameras and other equipment that will produce road images.
It was shown off to reporters at Town Hall Monday after it was used on the streets of Battleford on Saturday.
According to Michael Treffry, field operations supervisor at Fugro Roadware, the vehicle “profiles the road longitudinally and transversely. It also picks up pavement images as well as road images as we go along, and GPS. So basically we just put that all together, put it into a package and you have a pretty good understanding of your roads.”
Fugro are industry leaders in this technology, which has been around since the late 1970s.
The advantage of this particular equipment is that roads can be analyzed more quickly compared to before.
“The biggest advantage of the road analyzer is we can do it at a high rate of speed,” said Treffry. “We can go through an entire province in, say, a month or two, and process the data and get it back to the ministries quickly. And then they can understand their pavement systems and make decisions.”
Battleford council awarded the $78,000 contract to Catterall and Wright at their last council meeting in August, which meant Fugro could get started right away on the road assessment with the ARAN vehicle.
The collection side of the work is now complete, said Treffry, and now the data must be processed and that should take about a month. The GPR data is being sent off to Europe to be processed.
After that is done, Catterall and Wright will get to work.
“We will use the data to create a comprehensive report, with recommendations for rehabilitation based on the data,” said Carolyn Mathison of Catterall and Wright Consulting Engineers.
That should take another month to six weeks to be prepared. That will identify the “different maintenance strategies, depending on the condition of the roads, as well as prioritization,” Mathison said.
When completed, the report will be used by the town in preparing its five- and 10-year capital plan.
