Have you ever stopped to think about the sheer number of professions out there that people do every day? Back in 2003, the show Dirty Jobs with host Mike Rowe premiered. The episodes of Dirty Jobs highlighted different professions that were messy, hazardous, or just downright nasty—everything from cleaning septic tanks to collecting bat guano for fertilizer to artificially inseminating cows. For many viewers of the show, it was their first encounter with many of these types of professions. They were fascinated! As a result, the show was a hit and ran on the Discovery Channel for many years.
Beyond some of the dirty jobs that the show featured, there are other professions out there that you’ve probably never considered—especially if you work in an office environment or from the comfort of your home.
In this article, we wanted to highlight a unique profession: a GPR scanning technician. GPR stands for ground penetrating radar, and it is a technology that allows you to see what’s below the surface without disturbing it. GPR sends electromagnetic waves into the ground or a concrete slab or wall. How the waves bounce back helps a GPR technician determine where there are unseen hazards beneath or behind the surface.
People use GPR scanning services in various types of circumstances. The most common is in construction. If you wanted to excavate on your property, you would bring in GPR scanning services to scan the ground prior to starting excavation. That way, you could locate any buried utility lines or other things, such as storage tanks, septic systems, etc., and avoid hitting them. Or, if you wanted to renovate a building, but doing so would require drilling, cutting, or coring into the building’s concrete slab or CMU wall, you could have a GPR technician scan the areas in question to locate embedded utility lines and reinforcing materials first.
GPR scanning services are also used in archaeology, to give archaeologists an idea of where it would be best to start digging, as well as by law enforcement to find unmarked graves. The military can use GPR to detect mines and unexploded ordinances.
When using GPR scanning services, it is best if you have a good idea of where you want the technician to look. The scanning process can be a bit tedious, since the scanning device (which is typically the size of a lawnmower) needs to go over the entire surface that is being evaluated. So, it probably wouldn’t be a good use of your money to hire a GPR scanning service to scan multiple square miles for buried treasure, but bringing a GPR technician in for a more focused search could be quite beneficial to find what you are looking for (or to confirm that there is nothing located in the area you wish to disturb).
Working with a good GPR technician is crucial! Interpreting the data that a GPR scanner puts out correctly takes a good amount of training and on-the-job experience. Unlike an X-ray, which provides a technician with images, ground penetrating radar puts out wave-like images that need to be deciphered. Therefore, the accuracy of the information produced by a GPR scanner is highly dependent on the skill of your GPR technician.
