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KYTC’s engineers play a vital role in innovating solutions to challenges that impact future generations, so of course we had to make a video with them!
How can drones be useful to those building the roads that serve Kentucky? Justin Wilson, Samuel Turner and Zack Heath form the Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Program that seeks to answer that question. They look for ways to improve safety, such as surveying from the sky rather than traditional surveying where crews might have to work on the road near traffic or negotiate tricky terrain. This technology also allows for improved data collection and efficiency.
While working on the KY 461 and US 80 intersection in Somerset the team was able to fly this 4-mile job once a month for two years. This allowed inspectors to perform their duties remotely, out of harm’s way. The drones reduced what would have been more than 80 hours of duty in a hazardous work zone to only two. Over the last four years the team has captured more than 400,000 photographs for 50-plus projects.
 UAS also provides higher-quality imagery than you would find on Google Maps, which relies on traditional aerial photography. One major advantage of the UAS technology is the ability to see what is beneath a tree canopy, as illustrated in the photo below.
New technology provides new opportunities. Research and Markets predict a 50 percent increase in demand for drone pilots over the next five years. If this sounds interesting to you, it requires a Part 107 Remote UAS pilot license.
 Photo 1: Eastern Kentucky flooding inspections, Summer 2022; Photo 2: Standing next to an off-road dump truck, Summer 2022; Photo 3: Bridge Inspection, Summer 2023.
My name is Meaghan Czarnecki and I am a senior Civil Engineering student at Western Kentucky University. I applied for the KYTC scholarship as a sophomore and began receiving the scholarship in my junior year. I applied to the KYTC scholarship program through the recommendation of a friend. Western Kentucky University had a career fair and KYTC was in attendance. My friend went to their booth and told me about the great opportunity and I applied immediately! The deadline was approaching, so I had to get two letters of recommendation quickly. Shortly after, I had my interview and was accepted into the scholarship program. Applying for the KYTC scholarship program was the absolute best decision I made during my college career. Not only have I been able to stay out of debt, but it has allowed me to have so many opportunities and meet so many amazing people.
The first summer I was employed with KYTC I rotated through three groups in the Division of Maintenance. My last rotation was bridge preservation and I absolutely loved the work I was able to do with them! I was given the opportunity to attend bridge “climb school” earlier in the summer and got to inspect many bridges over that summer. During the Eastern Kentucky flooding in 2022, I went with a few bridge inspectors to perform emergency bridge inspections. Being able to experience so many people coming together to assist in Eastern Kentucky was amazing to see. I am so grateful I was given the opportunity to experience that! For my last summer employement, I was allowed to spend my whole summer with the bridge preservation branch. My summer involved reading bridge plans and bridge inspection reports and inspecting bridges. Upon graduation, I am going to be hired and given the opportunity to rotate through a few different positions and I am excited to learn so much. I have had so many opportunities through the KYTC and I will be forever thankful I was accepted into the program!
Intern Interviews KYTC Director of Planning
KYTC Division of Planning intern, Tyler Wilder, sat down with his supervisor, Mikael Pelfrey to learn more about his journey at the Cabinet.
What is your title? Director, Division of Planning
What does your role involve? Oversight of around 45 employees; tasked with delivering many federally-required activities laid out in the Statewide Planning & Research (SPR) Work Program including traffic counting/reporting, data management inventory of all state-maintained roadway mileage, production of the Official State Highway Map, processing roadway transfers through the Official Order process, regional and metropolitan planning activities, performing transportation studies, traffic forecasting/travel demand modeling, air quality planning, freight planning, and the state’s bicycle/pedestrian program.
How long have you worked at KYTC? 17.5 years
What made you choose your career field? I’ve always been strong in math and science so I gravitated toward a profession that put me in a position to best utilize my skills.
Could you tell me about an upcoming project you are excited about? In the Division of Planning, we work on a lot of projects then pass those off to construction divisions so we don’t see many of our initial efforts come to fruition. One that's different is the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program that we have worked on now for two years now, first developing a plan with designated Alternative Fuel Corridors (all of Kentucky’s interstates and parkways) to facilitate long-distance travel. We solicited proposals at the end of last summer and awarded 24 site locations to seven developers last October. Early this week we broke ground for construction at the first site, and hope to have it operational by April. I had the opportunity to share the podium with Governor Beshear and provide comments on behalf of KYTC. Kentucky is the first state in the southeast to break ground, and if we stay on schedule will be the first southeast state to open a station. A second Request for Proposals for developers to submit proposals for 16 additional locations went live recently. Approximately 40 sites will be needed for build-out (every 50 miles) on the interstates and parkways. Once complete, we will be able to move to other routes of importance for the state and local communities.
If you could give any advice to someone new in the cabinet, what would it be? The Cabinet is a large organization of professionals who perform a wide variety of duties from field work in maintenance and construction, to those in a typical office environment. Find out what your niche is, and explore the opportunity. Personally, I was exposed to planning while in another division on a project team at the start of my career in 2007 – specifically while planning for increased traffic demands from attendees from across the world for the 2010 World Equestrian Games. I was successful after applying for an open position in the division in 2011, and worked my way up the ladder to director.
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The Kentucky Engineering Exposure Network is very proud of the now bi-monthly SPARKS newsletter, which we write to help relay information about the transportation systems in Kentucky and how we manage them. The SPARKS newsletter is a source of education, information and opportunities for Kentucky's student base, and we are pleased to announce that this very newsletter just received some accolades.
The Transportation Cabinet received an award from the Kentucky Association of Government Communicators (KAGC) for the SPARKS newsletter. At the KAGC Awards and Annual meeting, exceptional communication materials and campaigns are recognized. These awards are issued at three levels of distinction: Award of Excellence (1st Place), Award of Merit (2nd Place) and Honorable Mention.
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The SPARKS newsletter was recognized with an Award of Excellence!
Readers, please consider signing up for this newsletter and recommend it to others. KYTC's KEEN program can teach in classrooms as well as through our newsletter. Thank you for subscribing!
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 The SPARKS newsletter is emailed periodically to subscribers with information about careers, STEM presentations, events and more. Please sign up below:
Do you like to be outside? Do you like to work with your hands? Do you like puzzles? If you said yes to these three questions (or even a couple of them), you might be an archaeologist – or have what it takes to become one!
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Archaeologists work on puzzles nearly every day – whether it’s piecing together the broken sherds of a ceramic pitcher recovered from the privy of an historic house or trying to recreate an entire Native American village that disappeared hundreds of years ago. We use these puzzles to try to tell the stories of the people and events that came before us, to gain a better understanding of who we are, and to tell the stories of those who may not show up in your history books.
When the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet builds roads, we complete studies before the work begins to make sure we aren’t damaging the environment – and that includes archaeological sites.
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People often think about Greek temples or Egyptian pyramids when they hear the word “archaeology” and may be surprised to learn that it goes way beyond classical thinking. There are more than 25,000 archaeological sites recorded in Kentucky, and probably hundreds of thousands more that haven’t been recorded yet. |
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 Some of the archaeological sites in Kentucky are 15,000 years old, and date to the Pleistocene, when wooly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers lived here. The number and type of sites archaeologists have recorded in Kentucky are broad and far-reaching, and include Native American mounds and earthworks, villages and quarries, sites from the pioneer days of Daniel Boone, huge historic furnaces for making iron, and fortifications from the Civil War.
All of these sites have something to say about our past, but some sites have lost their integrity – meaning they have been disturbed by nature (like groundhogs) or modern society (think parking lots and big box stores) and we can’t learn much from them or understand the story they are trying to tell. For sites like that, their stories are lost forever, and we can’t learn anything after we identify them.
Other archaeological sites, though, have not been disturbed, and when we find sites like that – ones whose stories are still there for us to learn from – we either avoid them to save them for the future, or, if they can’t be avoided, we carefully excavate them to learn as much as we can about the people who lived there before, and what those people did at that site. Little by little, we can fill in gaps about the past that we don’t know anything about and tell the stories of those who came before us.
For more information about archaeology in Kentucky, visit KYTC’s archaeology page found here: https://transportation.ky.gov/Archaeology/Pages/default.aspx or the Discover Kentucky Archaeology page, found here: https://archaeology.ky.gov/Pages/index.aspx
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