San Gorgonio River Monitoring: A Case Study

This paper will describe a case study of the installation of scour monitoring devices on the Interstate 10 (I-10) Bridges crossing the San Gorgonio River east of the City of Banning in Riverside County, California. The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) required that the project area be monitored for a potential headcut resulting from a levee break protecting a large and deep gravel operation that would damage the Interstate 10 bridges upstream. The plan consists of installing monitoring equipment to have three levels of monitoring to provide a high level of redundancy. They include (1) Monitoring the recently constructed engineered levee along the San Gorgonio River, (2) Monitoring cross sections of the San Gorgonio River itself for potential headcutting, and (3) Monitoring the I-10 bridges for scour and water surface elevation. Background information, discussion about these three levels of monitoring, implementation approach, and proposed equipment, lessons learned and construction challenges will also be discussed in the paper.