CASE STUDY: WSP, PORT HOPE

The program

The Port Hope Area Initiative is, in Canadian Nuclear Laboratories' words, "currently one of Canada's largest environmental remediation projects." It's a Government of Canada commitment, delivered by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, dealing with historic low-level radioactive waste across Port Hope and Clarington, Ontario. It runs as two projects, Port Hope and Port Granby, each with its own long-term waste management facility.

WSP does remediation verification on it: scanning the town of Port Hope property by property and mapping gamma impacts at property level.

The problem

A walkover survey produces two things: a reading and the position it was taken at. The reading comes from the instrument. The position is the hard part.

At property level, across a whole town, over years, three things have to hold at once. Every reading needs a position good enough that the spot can be found again next week. Thousands of readings a day have to reach the office without anyone typing them in. And the dataset has to stay consistent across crews, seasons and staff changes, because on a program this long the data has to outlive the people who collected it.

That's a positioning and data-handling problem, not a radiation problem.

The workflow

Twelve TerraFlow Mobile licences. Ludlum Model 2221 scaler/ratemeters, read directly by the app. Trimble R2 receivers, now being upgraded to the R980, with Can-Net corrections for RTK positioning. One record a second.

The technician sees the gamma readout and the map together, live, as they walk. Every reading becomes a point on the map, stamped with where it was taken and carrying the meter's own values.

Records write to ArcGIS Online on their own, where office staff look at the data while it's still being collected.

What changed

The office sees the data while the crew is still on the property. Analysis doesn't wait for a day's collection to be uploaded and cleaned. Remediation on a property can start while the technician is still scanning.

The record is structured the moment it's captured. Nobody transcribes a reading and nobody fixes a position afterwards. At thousands of points a day, that's the difference between a dataset and a backlog.

In their words

"Terraflow has been instrumental in getting our Remediation Verification program off the ground and managing the mass of data that is collected on an ongoing basis. We typically collect thousands of data points per day. Terraflow has allowed us to upload this data expediently and allow us to review results and make decisions in near real time. We could not execute the work required without the software and support."

John DeWilde, MEng, PEng, QP Senior Environmental Engineer / Team Lead, WSP

Eleven years, two prime contractors, two technology generations

TerraFlow's work at Port Hope didn't start with WSP.

In 2015 we built a custom sensor mapping application on ArcGIS Mobile for the prime contractor at the time. WSP has run TerraFlow Mobile across the same program since 2021.

That's eleven years of continuous involvement, through a change of prime contractor and a change of technology generation.

On a program measured in decades, the data has to outlive the contractor, the staff and the software that collected it. That's a different engineering problem from collecting it well, and no demo can show it to you. You find out whether a vendor got it right when it's too late to change vendors.

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The takeaway

Instruments get replaced. Prime contracts change hands. Staff move on. The record is the only thing that has to survive all three, and whether it does is decided by how it was structured the day it was captured.

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