Pilot Installation of a Bridge Scour Monitoring Site

A pilot scour monitoring system was installed at the Mustang Creek bridge crossing on FM-1157 in Jackson County, Texas. It consists of four ultrasonic sensors mounted on four bridge piers. Maintenance engineers have access to the scour and stage data remotely through a cellular phone and modem at the site, which are powered by a battery and solar panels. The datalogger at the site is capable of monitoring multiple types of sensors, such as pressure transducers for stage, and ultrasonic and magnetic sliding collar sensors for scour. This fully programmable datalogger can generate alarm calls to an office computer when certain preprogrammed thresholds for stage and scour are reached. Automatic paging software, residing in an office computer, sends alarm calls to alphanumeric pagers carried by Texas Department of Transportation maintenance staff, based on alarm callbacks from the datalogger in the field.