Bridge & Infrastructure Scanning in Piedmont, CA

Piedmont has one landmark bridge and several hundred structures nobody calls bridges. The Oakland Avenue Bridge, completed in 1910 to replace a wooden cable-company trestle, carries the street over Linda Avenue on a reinforced concrete arch: about 363 feet of total length, a central span near 130 feet, a 22-foot roadway, and Mission Revival detailing by civil engineer John B. Leonard with architect Albert Farr, including tiled resting alcoves and end pylons. Pedestrian railings were installed on it in 2019. Everything else holding the city up is a retaining structure. Piedmont is built across the Oakland hills on narrow winding streets, and those streets, the driveways off them, and the terraced gardens between them stand on walls of every era and material, with culverted creek crossings and headwalls underneath. State Route 13 runs along the eastern edge with its Moraga Avenue connection.

A century-old ornamental concrete arch is a poor candidate for hand measurement and a good one for a scanner. The arch soffit, spandrel walls, columns, deck edge, railings, and the ornament itself come back as measured surfaces at millimeter fidelity, which is what a rehabilitation designer, a concrete repair contractor, or a historic-fabric assessment needs, and what a load rating needs when the original drawings no longer describe the structure. Retaining walls get the same treatment for a different reason: a wall face captured from a control network can be scanned again after a wet winter and differenced surface to surface, so bulging, rotation, and settlement show as a pattern rather than as a crack gauge reading somebody has to trust. Control is observed with GNSS and total station, adjusted by least squares with independent checks on NAD83 State Plane and NAVD88, and monumented to survive to the next epoch.

Deliverables are registered E57 or RCP clouds, DWG or DXF sections, elevations, and profile drawings, mesh models where ornament or curvature matters, clearance figures under the arch, and epoch comparison exhibits. Local bridges advancing through the federal Highway Bridge Program and Caltrans Local Assistance carry documentation expectations we scope to. See infrastructure scanning, Piedmont 3D scanning, and deformation monitoring.