He eventually sold the technology to a Swiss company - and then looked around for what to do next. In 1992, he founded a company to develop the lunchbox-size laser scanner. A few years later, after earning a master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Illinois, he moved to the Bay Area to begin a career in engineering. Kacyra immigrated to the United States in 1964. During long walks, his father told him stories of the Assyrian ruins that remain sprinkled throughout the ancient city, known as Nineveh during biblical times. He has a passion for history and architecture, passed down to him from his engineer father, while growing up in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. “It’s not the heritage sites themselves, but what they represent and the stories they tell us that are so important,” Kacyra said. Within the next few years, CyArk hopes to scan 500 heritage sites around the globe. But CyArk has since used the $100,000 devices all over the world to digitally preserve dozens of well-known monuments, including Mount Rushmore, the ancient Roman city of Pompeii and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Kacyra originally designed his laser-scanner as a portable tool to make highly accurate 3-D digital blueprints of dangerous sites, such as nuclear reactors, that are hard for surveyors to access. Because of the enormous costs of the retrofits - $10 million to $20 million per site - work has been completed at only a handful. As a result, California in 1995 mandated that seismic retrofits of the missions be completed by 2015. Indeed, each of the missions has been damaged to some degree by seismic activity.
More precisely, they are vulnerable to earthquakes because the Mission Trail overlaps a large portion of the San Andreas Fault. “And they are in extreme danger - and have been for many years - because they all lie along the ‘ring of fire.'” “The missions are critically important to the history of California and of the United States,” said CyArk director Ben Kacyra, 72, a former civil engineer.
Up and down the coast of the Golden State, engineers from Oakland-based nonprofit CyArk are in a race against time, using laser-scanning technology to digitally preserve an important part of California’s heritage: the 21 missions, four presidios and three pueblos of the California Mission Trail, commonly known as El Camino Real. The goal: create 3-D digital blueprints of the historic landmark to make sure it remains part of California’s landscape forever. Over the course of 2ï»❱/2 days, they repositioned the tripod more than 120 times, bathing every nook and cranny of the mission and its grounds with the emerald-green laser. In spring 2011, engineers using a tripod-mounted laser shot 50,000 beams per second at Mission Dolores, San Francisco’s oldest standing structure.
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