A truly unique article entitled “Reducing shoaling in the Texas Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW) and erosion of Barrier Islands along West Galveston Bay” has won this year’s IADC Young Author Award.
This project utilized a Regional Sediment Management (RSM) approach in an attempt to quantify the source of sediments, develop a conceptual design and associated cost estimation for remediation techniques to allow for the continued maintenance dredging of this portion of the Texas GIWW.
The erosion of the thin string of upland placement areas sheltering the GIWW from Galveston Bay is contributing to the shoaling rate; however the presence of these islands is reducing the amount of sediment load the channel would otherwise be experiencing.
The analyses conducted for this effort included: shoaling estimates using historical dredging records; aerial photography for shoreline erosion rate calculations; the ERDC Sediment Budget Analysis System (SBAS) was applied to compile existing sediment erosion and shoaling estimates; numerical modeling using the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center’s (ERDC) Coastal Modeling System (CMS) was used to verify the observed trends; and various design alternatives were analyzed for their potential for reducing channel shoaling and shoreline erosion.
This article is based on a paper that was published in the proceedings of the 33rd PIANC World Congress in San Francisco, California. It was presented by Corragio Maglio at the Congress, where it was awarded the IADC Young Authors Award.
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Press Release, October 15, 2014