3D Scanning in Central Valley, CA

The northern valley is a logistics corridor. Lathrop, incorporated in 1989 with the San Joaquin River running through the middle of town, holds the Sharpe facility of the Defense Distribution Depot San Joaquin, and Tesla is its largest employer. Manteca has a Union Pacific intermodal facility and an Amazon fulfillment center. Down Interstate 5, Patterson, long known as the Apricot Capital of the World, now hosts several large retail distribution centers. New buildings of that size need construction verification: anchor bolts and structural steel checked to 1/8 inch from the scan, with total station check shots on any bolt group near tolerance, and slab deviation and levelness maps before and after the pour. Existing ones need clear heights, column grids, and slab elevations before racking, conveyors, or mezzanines go in. Along Highway 99, Ceres and Turlock bring food processing and medical work; Turlock is home to Foster Farms, Emanuel Medical Center, and California State University, Stanislaus, which opened in 1960.

Farther south the work changes again. UC Merced, the tenth and newest University of California campus, held its first classes in September 2005 on land north of the city of Merced. Fresno, the county seat and the fifth-most populous city in California, has older fabric like the Old Fresno Water Tower, built in 1894, and the early-1900s buildings of the Tower District. Between Madera and Shafter, 119 miles of California High-Speed Rail are under active construction, including the San Joaquin River Viaduct, completed in February 2021. Rail structures, campus buildings, and industrial sites from Los Banos to Madera all benefit from capture on one control network. A viaduct, a retaining wall, or a campus quad scanned against survey control can be compared with design or with a later scan, and a renovation team gets measured plans, sections, and elevations rather than a set of drawings that stopped matching the building years ago.

Contour Survey is based in Lotus, El Dorado County. Valley work is planned as a mobilization, with field days grouped so control, scanning, and check shots happen in one trip. Control is primary GNSS with secondary Trimble S3 total station control, every Trimble X9 setup is tied to it, and processing is in Trimble Business Center in US survey feet, held to 0.01 US survey feet relative to project control. Deliverables are registered, cleaned point clouds (E57, LAS, or RCP), scan-to-CAD plans, sections, elevations, 3D linework, coded points, and a report stating the control basis, units, and accuracy achieved. City pages: Stockton, Lodi, Tracy, Modesto, Merced, and Fresno. See also 3D laser scanning and as-built surveys.