Site webcams can offer much more fundamental benefits than just producing a time-lapse film upon completion, reports Helena Russell

While closed-circuit television cameras have long been used by transportation departments for traffic management and for providing information to commuters, it is only fairly recently that bridge owners, designers and builders have started to appreciate the possible benefits that webcams can offer on bridge construction projects.

As well as offering a benefit in terms of publicity and community outreach, giving people a chance to see construction in progress and to raise awareness of how bridges are built, webcams can also be invaluable in project management, progress monitoring, providing visual information for team members who are not based on site, and even being used to settle claims relating to the project.

Until fairly recently, the use of webcams on construction sites was still very much the preserve of universities and computer geeks. Often the cameras would be a very basic model, fixed up by one of the team as a bit of fun and broadcasting the pictures onto a web page accessed by him and his friends.

Earthcam founder and CEO Brian Cury identifies 9/11 as the turning point for construction projects, particularly for the US market. "After 9/11, people didn't want to travel as much," he explains. "Originally we had been laughed out of construction offices, but suddenly everyone could see the benefit of being able to view the site remotely."

His firm has been in business since 1996; as well as selling equipment and software, it offers full turnkey solutions to clients including custom-designed web pages, archiving and consultancy services.

"There are three main reasons why people use webcams on construction sites," says Cury. "Firstly is the project management aspect, being able to see the work live, from a unique viewpoint. You can watch people and equipment moving about, measure progress, and check that staff and subcontractors are adhering to the correct safety procedures.

"Secondly is the documentation aspect, and this is particularly true with the high-resolution and super high-resolution cameras that we sell. Images from these cameras might be used for resolving claims or checking operations on a particular day - with a very high-quality image you can digitally zoom in to see details.

"Thirdly is the promotional aspect, which is often overlooked," he says. Many of Earthcam's clients want systems that can only be viewed by authorised users, rather than sharing the information with the community. But this varies depending on which party is funding the system - sometimes it is the contractor who has to install it under a clause in the contract, with live images made available on the internet to promote the project and play a part in community outreach. Of course it is possible to tailor the system to suit - Earthcam, for example, can offer five different levels of security that give the user different levels of control - from simply being able to view images to being allowed to zoom and pan the camera.

While Earthcam provides webcams to many different industries, Oxblue Corporation specialises in supplying systems to the construction industry. Chandler McCormack, who founded the company along with Bryan Mattern in 2001, was able to draw on his ten years' experience of civil engineering project management to help him understand the challenges facing site webcam systems, and the requirements of the clients.

Both Mattern and McCormack are graduates of the Georgia Institute of Technology; McCormack's practical experience in the commercial construction sector was backed up by expertise in visualisation technology, while Mattern was a specialist in the development of enterprise communication platforms and had a background in construction engineering.

McCormack explains that the idea for the company took hold when he and Mattern were asked to set up a system of webcams for a real estate development - the intention was to enable overseas investors to be able to keep up to speed with progress. But trying to develop something suitable with off-the-shelf solutions threw up a lot of technical difficulties and involved high costs. "We started to think about how we could improve it, developing specific cameras, connections, hosting systems and so on," he says.

Delivered as contracted, the system exceeded expectations; as the project progressed the power of the system to every member of the project team was revealed. Contractors were able to coordinate changes in real time with the design teams, owners were kept in the loop on progress, unnecessary communications were reduced across the board and schedule disputes were all but eliminated. But not without the cost of highly modified hardware and hundreds of man-hours of development time.

"The need was established and the potential of such a system was revealed," says McCormack.

Oxblue's challenging projects include the development of a system for the construction of the new Galena Creek bridge in Nevada. Bowling Mamola Group was originally retained by the Nevada Department of Transportation to provide webcams on the construction project for two very specific reasons, but as Randy Bowling explains, it soon became clear that they had many other benefits that could be exploited.

The DoT commissioned the company to establish the cameras with the aim of producing a documentary about the construction of the new bridge, and also time-lapse footage showing the process from start to finish. But if this was the intention from the outset, once the system was up and running, it turned out to have many other uses that had not even been envisaged by the DoT. "While there is definitely a benefit in terms of public outreach," admits Bowling, "there are tremendous benefits for other aspects of the work such as project management and contractor claims, for example."

The Galena Creek site was particularly challenging in terms of installing the system because of the fact that the terrain was rugged, the environmental conditions extreme and the services non-existant. The main element of the bridge project at Galena Creek involves the construction of a large arch; Bowling Mamola started with a concept of what the system was going to be composed of, and as Bowling recalls; "We jumped right in and then saw quite a few hurdles." Not the least of which was that there was no electrical power for the cameras, nor telecommunications link via which to transmit the data. Even getting the camera towers into place across the rugged terrain was something of a challenge. The cameras needed to be a certain distance away to be able to capture the full area of the bridge, which meant they had to be beyond even the access roads which had been set up for the construction.

At the time, the webcam company with which Bowling Mamola started to work only offered hardwired cameras which needed a phone line to send data through. But it was clear that solar-powered cameras that could communicate via cellphone signals would offer so much more flexibility to Oxblue's potential clients, and it made sense to put the effort into developing this technology. Indeed almost all of the firm's webcams now work along these lines.

Bowling also recalls the difficulty they faced in erecting the cameras and solar panels - to build towers in such an inaccessible location was no easy feat. A lightweight open frame aluminium tower design was developed - it could be brought to the site in pieces on foot, then erected at the appropriate location. It also has very little wind res