Timelapse of Brandon Road Lock during USGS Dye Study

This is a timelapse video of a dye tracer study at Brandon Road Lock, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) facility in Joliet, IL, on the Des Plaines River on October 20, 2015. This video was collected using a digital camera mounted on the upstream gates of the lock looking downstream with a 5-second interval between images and played back at 10 frames per second (fps). This data collection is supporting efforts to combat the spread of invasive Asian carp into the Great Lakes Basin. Brandon Road Lock and Dam has been tentatively selected by the USACE as a location to apply controls to stop the upstream movement of these fish. To develop these controls, resource managers need to understand how the water moves through the system and the fate and transport of dissolved constituents within and downstream of the lock chamber (measured using the surrogate dye tracer). The video shows the initially empty lock chamber that is filled while dye was injected into the upstream water intakes and distributed throughout the lock chamber by way of the fill-water distribution system. The dyed water fills the lock and a survey crew measures vertical profiles of the dye concentration at 15 stations in the lock chamber using a submersible fluorometer and rope and pulley system. The lock is emptied, surveyed again at the same 15 stations, and then flushed for 17 minutes with the downstream gates open and the upstream valves 25 percent open. Significant turbulence and circulation can be seen during the flushing procedure, but floating debris and surface scum remain trapped in the upstream portion of the lock. Following the flushing procedure, the downstream gates are closed and the lock chamber is surveyed one final time to map the post-flushing dye distribution. The video ends as the lock is filled in preparation for reopening the lock to commercial traffic.