Louisiana DOT Goes Mobile for Levee Inspections
with TerraGo Custom Field Application

Louisiana’s Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD) is responsible for managing the state’s massive flood protection infrastructure. The DOTD’s Public Works and Water Resources Division manages the inspection program for all levees, dams and reservoirs. The challenges with levees alone are particularly daunting. There are over 1,100 miles of levees that must be inspected four times, each and every year. Flood risk and levee conditions are dynamic in nature, as banks erode, animals burrow, closures rust, valves wear out and pumps need repaired. So the field technology needs to be reliable and efficient to help turn inspection reports into preventive maintenance as quickly as possible. In 2015, the inspection system was a custom-built application developed by an engineering services firm. The system utilized Trimble YUMA ruggedized tablets. that would sync to a central database for reporting. Over time, the system became less and less reliable, and required a lot of troubleshooting, largely due to database synchronization failures. To truly fix the system would have meant more expensive custom development services. And that wasn’t the only expensive element of the system. Each of the six Trimble YUMA hardware units, fully configured, ran around $6,000 and the annual software maintenance was around $18,000, which only provided upgrades and bug fixes. It did nothing to help solve the database issues.