W&A Engineering is performing land surveying and remote scanning services for the revitalization of Nashville’s Second Avenue three years after a devastating Christmas explosion gutted the popular street block in the heart of Nashville, Tennessee.
On December 25, 2020, a recreational vehicle filled with explosives was detonated, injuring eight and turning a tree-lined block of some of the city’s oldest buildings to rubble. Since, the city and state have worked with design and construction partners to return the well-loved downtown community to its previous state of grandeur.
Revitalization efforts have seen partners such as Reeves Young, a fully-integrated construction company headquartered in Sugar Hill, Georgia, join the project team. W&A Engineering’s Nashville-based land surveying professionals are working alongside Reeves Young, the Construction Manager at Risk for the project, to provide land surveying and remote scanning services.
Reality Capture Manager Blake Olin who leads the firm’s LiDAR and remote scanning services in Nashville has been able to debut a new service offering during his work on the Second Avenue project: the use of 360 imaging and panoramic capture to provide site documentation throughout the project’s lifecycle.
The use of 360 imaging provides a full site picture without stakeholders or designers having to physically be on site. This information provides site documentation for stakeholder meetings to determine next steps, in addition to vital modeling data throughout the planning, design, and execution phases of the construction phase.
As part of this service, aerial video footage paired with two-dimensional orthomosaic mapping is also provided for month-to-month site comparison and to track resource allocation in order to keep the project on schedule.
“We’re able to provide so much useful information with these new service offerings,” said Olin. “Utilizing our drone equipment in combination with our years of experience flying, we’re able to capture precise data in close quarters with structures and obstacles which is perfect for a project like this one. The orthomosaics themselves wouldn’t be able to penetrate the tree canopy to capture sidewalks or anything beneath the trees, but the 360 images capture everything from every angle at the highest resolution possible. You could count the rocks on the ground if you wanted to.”
Construction on the north block between Church Street and Union Street began in the spring of 2023. According to the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency, construction on the north block has a projected schedule of 12 months.