News

Galveston Engineer District Awards Survey Contract To eTrac

The Galveston Engineer District has awarded eTrac, a Woolpert Company, an architect-engineer contract to provide hydrographic surveying and mapping services within the Galveston District and potentially the Corps’ Southwest Division. The five-year, multiple award task order contract has a total shared capacity of $13 million. It will support planning, design, construction and maintenance projects to help advance navigation safety, dredging, flood control, beach nourishment, hurricane response and similar Corps civil works projects.

Under this contract, eTrac will conduct hydrographic and bathymetric surveys of offshore waters, shallow- and deep-draft inland waterways and channels, coastal areas, inland lakes, rivers and other bodies of water. The company will collect and process shallow-water, multibeam sounding data, side-scan sonar data and vertical-beam echosounder data to support a wide range of services, which could include planimetric, boundary and utility surveying. In addition, eTrac and Woolpert will support this contract with photogrammetric mapping, engineering and design; geodetic control surveys; and the collection, processing and management of high-accuracy GIS data.

“These hydrographic surveys will serve multiple purposes for the Corps, helping them develop physical and numerical models for planning and design projects, support coastal engineering research, scan for channel debris following hurricanes to ensure safe passage, determine the present condition and future needs of coastal and inland navigation channels and more,” Woolpert Certified Hydrographer David Neff said. “We always consider it a privilege to support civil works projects, which provide a wealth of critical water resources and services to support the blue economy.”

In 2003, eTrac Inc. was established as a hydrographic survey, vessel positioning and marine instrumentation firm and has quickly grown. The company has established multiple offices along the U.S. coastline, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Anchorage, the Pacific Northwest and the Gulf of Mexico. Its fleet has expanded to include geophysical survey vessels as well as several ultra-portable, shallow water survey craft. In 2022, eTrac was acquired by Woolpert, a global architecture, engineering and geospatial firm.

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