Bridge & Infrastructure Scanning in Emeryville, CA

Emeryville is small enough to walk across and dense enough with structure that almost nothing here is at grade for long. The Powell Street interchange is the only westbound freeway access into the city, and the Powell Street bridge carries the same street over the Union Pacific mainline immediately east of it. The South Bayfront Bridge, a 227-foot steel arch lifted into place over the railroad right-of-way during a four-hour night window in December 2020 and opened the following year, connects the Bay Street side to Horton Street. The Ashby Avenue interchange at the Berkeley line brings State Route 13 to I-80. South of the city, the I-80, I-580, and I-880 connectors of the MacArthur Maze begin. Between them run the at-grade rail crossings at 65th, 66th, and 67th Streets and the Capitol Corridor platforms, all of it on filled bay margin.

Working over an active railroad is what shapes the method. Union Pacific grants short windows, so a survey has to be finished inside one, and a scanner set for a few minutes per position finishes far more of a structure in that time than a crew with a rod and prism. We observe a control network with GNSS and total station off the right-of-way, adjust it by least squares with independent checks on NAD83 State Plane and NAVD88, and register every setup to it, so the result is a coordinate product an agency or railroad can review. From it come vertical clearance over the tracks computed across the full width of the crossing, arch and girder geometry as measured surfaces, bearing, joint, abutment, and wingwall detail for rehabilitation, and baseline epochs for settlement on soft ground where the pile-supported structure and the fill around it move at different rates.

Deliverables are registered E57 or RCP clouds, clearance envelopes, DWG or DXF sections, elevations, and framing plans, surface and mesh models for arch and ramp geometry, and epoch comparison exhibits. Local bridges funded through the federal Highway Bridge Program and Caltrans Local Assistance have documentation expectations we scope to. See infrastructure scanning, Emeryville 3D scanning, and deformation monitoring.