DAN-NY, Background

Technical Note DOER-N2

April 1998

DAN-NY

Background

Historically, the New York District has had a difficult open-water dredged material placement site

to manage. The Mud Dump site, a 2.1- by 3.7-km rectangle located 11 km east of Sandy Hook, NJ,

has been used since interim designation in 1973. The site's proximity to commercial and recreational

fishing areas, historic disposal sites, and heavy shipping through the approaches to New York

Harbor create a unique set of circumstances from a site management perspective. For most of the

time since site designation, the site has received an average of 4.3 M m3 per year of mostly

fine-grained maintenance material (Massa et al. 1996) from an average of 20+ Federal and private

projects.

Over the years, challenges in three different areas led the New York District to fund development

of the first software package for managing open-water disposal sites, DAN-NY (Clausner, McDow-

ell, and May 1997). The first management challenge was concern over site capacity. The desire to

maximize site capacity (and not to exceed safe navigation depths) and contain the sediments inside

the site was a major driving factor for developing a computerized GIS system to provide a more

sophisticated level of site management. The second concern was the desire to improve capping of

contaminated dredged materials placed in the Mud Dump site. The third major need resulted from

the variety of locations and media on which the New York District stored information relevant to

site management. It was difficult to access and display the data needed to make decisions.

Both WES and SAIC have supported the New York District in their site management activities for

many years. SAIC collected a considerable amount of monitoring data at the Mud Dump site and

assisted with operational details for capping operations, while WES assisted in capping project

design (Randall, Clausner, and Johnson 1994) and computations of site capacity (Clausner and

Greges 1995). In 1994, SAIC proposed joint development of a software system, DAN-NY, to assist

the New York District with open-water site management. In the joint effort, SAIC's expertise in

monitoring and data collection was combined with the strengths of ASA, a firm specializing in

hydrodynamic numerical modeling using GIS, and WES' expertise in capping, fate modeling, and

site capacity.

Phased Implementation

DAN-NY is being developed in phases. Phase 1 was a system design study, which defined data

types, hardware, software, costs, and schedule for implementing subsequent phases. Phase 1 was

completed in May 1996 (SAIC 1996). Phase 2 was to design and implement the system including

developing and documenting data management systems and training of New York District and WES

staff. Concurrent with Phase 2 was Phase 3, which selected the data needed and then populated the

databases. Phases 2 and 3 were completed in June 1997. Phase 4, now underway, is to maintain the

system, add enhanced software and analysis, and continue populating the database with additional

data sets.