DATE: Thursday, June 26, 1997               TAG: 9706250667

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Military 

SOURCE: BY ALVA CHOPP, CORRESPONDENT 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   90 lines

A ROAD FOR BOSNIAATLANTIC DIVISION ENGINEERS USE SATELLITES TO DESIGN AWARD-WINNING PROJECT<

Mountains, gorges and rivers were only a small obstacle to laying the groundwork for a new road in Bosnia.

There were also 6 million unmarked land mines.

The Naval Facilities Engineering Command didn't let that stand in the way. With satellite positioning and aerial photography, 26 members of the Norfolk-based Atlantic Division designed a highway to connect Sarajevo and Gorazde and won a prestigious award in the process.

The Commander's Award, the top prize in the command's 1997 Design Awards Program, was presented to the local division this month. It was the culmination of a project that began four months after the signing of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord for Bosnia.

Boundaries established in the peace accord left a narrow area between the two Muslim-held cities, surrounded by Serb territory. It was through this area, known as the Gorazde Corridor, that a two-lane, all-weather road, 110 kilometers long, was proposed.

Designing a road is not usually a difficult process for the Atlantic Division. Around the world, from the Atlantic, Caribbean, Mediterranean and Persian Gulf shores, the United Kingdom and Africa, division personnel develop shore-based naval facilities.

But this road was different.

The Gorazde Corridor already had a crude road through mountains and gorges, across rivers and high plateaus. The challenge was to survey the road and design a new one so civilians and commercial vehicles could travel easily between the two cities.

William Crone, head of the engineering and design division and one of the first team members to visit the site, said terrain was a major obstacle. Other obstacles were land mines - 6 million of them.

Surveying the area at ground level would have been too dangerous and taken too long. With no reliable maps of the area, the Atlantic Division team decided to solicit the aid of its contingency construction contractors to take to the air. Using aerial photography linked with global satellite positioning data, a detailed topographic map and 3-D computer model were built.

``The 3-D model was extremely important because the engineers in Norfolk weren't in the country,'' said Jeff Creekmore, a civil engineer in the design division. ``We were designing a road in an area we had never seen before.''

It was a complex process. The first engineers to visit the site, in April 1996, were Crone, Capt. Chuck Kubic, Cmdr. Paul Kuzio and Lt. Cmdr. Mark Deibert.

After receiving the Army's approval of their proposal, Deibert and a team returned to the site in May 1996 to mark more than 15 ground control points for the satellite to survey. Because land mines were so numerous, the team used satellite radios to report their positions every hour.

The team painted white X's, two meters square, on the ground and marked the locations with a satellite transponder. Each X had to be accessible by vehicle, free of mines and suitable for the survey.

Time was critical. The aerial photographs could be taken only during a short period after snow had melted and before trees starting growing leaves that would block the view of the ground.

For the next several months, civil engineers at the Atlantic Division and at the Northern Division in Philadelphia worked on an engineering study and conceptual design for the proposed road. The final product was presented to the Bosnian government and to the U.S. Army Europe.

The construction estimate was almost $300 million.

``I don't think anyone thought it would cost this much,'' Creekmore said. ``This was the first time anyone had done an engineering plan of attack on how a contractor would go about building this road.''

Crone said the project was one of the costliest and most challenging designs ever done by the Atlantic Division. But even with all the obstacles, the conceptual design was completed in just seven months.

The survey, at a cost of $1.7 million, was funded by the U.S. Army Europe. If the project goes forward, a 100 percent design will still be needed. Whether the road is ever funded and built is up to the Bosnians.

``It was simply our job to take the engineering uncertainties out and come up with how to complete the project,'' said Cmdr. Neil Gamble, deputy project operations officer.

The Commander's Award for Design Excellence cited the physical obstacles and the team's use of leading-edge technology to overcome them.

``For any civil engineer, the ability to work with this technology was a dream come true,'' Crone said. ``We didn't go into this thing thinking we'd win a prize.'' ILLUSTRATION: TING-LI WANG

The Virginian-Pilot

William Crone, Jeff Creekmore, Cmdr. Mark Delbert...

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