Photo By Michael Maddox | Connor Estes, a geologist with the Dam Safety Section, reviews data from the MIDAS...... read more read more
Falls of Rough, Ky. – Members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Louisville District’s Dam Safety Section recently completed the installation of a new dam monitoring system at Rough River Dam in Falls of Rough, Kentucky. The system, known as the Monitoring Instrumentation Data Acquisition System (MIDAS), will provide several benefits in future dam monitoring operations.
Jackie Henn, dam safety program manager for the Louisville District, said the system will allow for a more modern way of monitoring the dam.
“MIDAS is used to acquire, store, and visualize instrumentation data in a centralized location that’s easily accessible online. The system allows manually acquired data from projects to be added on-line giving district staff the ability to quickly view data based on pool elevations and determine the health and integrity of dams during flood situations,” she said. “The Louisville District Dam Safety team worked with United States Geological Survey members to automate the data collection system at Rough River eliminating the need for project staff to walk the dam and manually collect the data. This allows for more frequent readings and real time transfer of data to the MIDAS system allowing a quicker response to instrument changes at the district level.”
“The Dam Safety team worked with the MIDAS programmers to set up all automated instruments in MIDAS so we could begin monitoring data real-time,” she added. “This included importing millions of points of data already collected in the old system and moving it to MIDAS. We then had to create new plots to better monitor the data and be able to perform QA/QC [Quality Assurance/Quality Control] efforts for the data.”
Henn said the installation of the system not only modernizes data collection, but also serves as a model for other districts.
“The goal for headquarters is to have all projects within USACE eventually added to the MIDAS system. The Louisville District is one of the first districts to migrate all instrumentation for all projects into MIDAS,” she said.
All reservoirs in the Louisville District utilize MIDAS for instrumentation monitoring, but the unique automated collection system at Rough River now allows Dam Safety to monitor the health of the dam from the district office in real time.
| Date Taken: | 03.13.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 03.17.2025 12:11 |
| Story ID: | 493022 |
| Location: | KENTUCKY, US |
| Web Views: | 35 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, New monitoring system at Rough River Dam streamlines data collection, enhances safety, by Michael Maddox, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
