Monument Preservation in Moraga, CA

Moraga sits on a difficult mix of Moraga Formation volcanics and Orinda Formation sediments, and the town is known for landslide activity on its developed slopes. The practical consequence is a recurring cycle of slide repairs, retaining walls, roadway rebuilds, and utility replacements through the ranch-style subdivisions laid out in the 1960s and 70s — and each of those projects digs in ground where boundary monuments were set half a century ago. Under California Business and Professions Code §8771, a monument that construction will disturb must be referenced by a licensed land surveyor before the work, with a Corner Record filed with the Contra Costa County Surveyor, and reset with a second filing after construction. On Moraga’s winding streets and semi-rural edges, monumentation is thin; when a trencher takes out one of the few surviving pipes on a long curving block, the retracement to restore that corner — record research, extended field search, possibly a Record of Survey — costs far more than the preservation work the statute contemplates.

Moving slopes raise the stakes further. On Moraga’s creeping hillsides, monuments do not just get destroyed — they get carried, a few millimeters to a few inches per wet winter, away from their record positions. Preservation records are the antidote: our ties and filed Corner Records establish where a monument stood before the movement or before the slide-repair excavation, preserving the evidence a future boundary resolution depends on. Where corners sit near open-space boundaries or within active repair zones, we use our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner to capture the monument’s entire physical context — pavement, walls, fences, slope face — as a survey-grade point cloud in a single visit, a dated record that no handful of conventional ties can match.

For the contractors, utility districts, and agencies working in Moraga, we run the complete §8771 sequence — search, referencing, pre- and post-construction Corner Record filings with the Contra Costa County Surveyor, and monument resets — and can pair it with slope and structure monitoring on projects where the ground is still moving.