As ground penetrating radar (GPR) equipment becomes more accessible, people and companies offering GPR scanning services are popping up all over the country. While it used to be rare to be able to find a GPR scanning service in your city, now there might be several of them (or at least several that service your city).
If this is the case, why would a GPR scanning company ever have to travel outside of their regular service area for a project? Couldn’t a client just hire a local company? Well, sometimes a job requires a higher level of expertise or tools in addition to just GPR scanners to achieve the client’s desired outcome.
If a project is fairly straightforward, such as a patch of dirt that needs to be scanned for buried hazards or a concrete slab that needs to be scanned to locate its embedded rebar, just about any company or individual with a quality GPR scanner and the technical know-how to interpret the scans will do. However, if there are some wild cards in the mix, such as less-than-optimal soil conditions or a highly congested concrete slab, you’ll want to work with a scanning company that offers a high level of expertise, as well as additional scanning tools.
Finding this type of company may require you to look outside of your immediate area for GPR scanning services.
On many occasions, Enhanced Scanning has traveled across the country—even as far as Alaska—for scanning projects. We frequently get called in for high-stakes projects that local companies can’t handle—like this one in Utah that involved a high-profile government facility. This client had no margin for error, so we brought in multiple tools. In addition to a single-channel GPR antenna, we utilized an electromagnetic (EM) locator and a soil conductivity meter, and once we found something unexpected, we confirmed the results with a magnetometer. We were able to locate a long-forgotten monitoring well that we never would have found had we only used ground penetrating radar. If the monitoring well had been hit during excavation, it likely would have brought the project to a screeching halt and put everything behind schedule (and would probably have created bad publicity for our client as well).
Clients who need this level of thoroughness are willing to bring in a company like ours—even if we are located outside of their immediate area. And we are happy to travel wherever we are needed to help people get the results they need to proceed safely with their projects. Yes, you will have to pay some travel fees, but we do our best to keep our fees to a minimum for our clients.
Do you have a project in need of GPR scanning services? Contact us to discuss details or to schedule service, no matter where you are in the country!