3D Scanning in El Cerrito, CA

El Cerrito is a narrow city, roughly a mile wide, running from the bay flats up to the ridge, and the demand for scan data clusters along its spine. San Pablo Avenue is State Route 123, a Caltrans-maintained arterial lined with mid-century commercial buildings that are steadily being reworked or replaced as mixed-use infill, and the two BART stations on the Richmond line, El Cerrito Plaza and El Cerrito del Norte, anchor the densest development the city sees. Architects working those sites, structural engineers scoping concrete and tilt-up retrofits, facilities staff at schools and civic buildings, and public agencies planning work in the transit corridor all need the same thing before design starts: a measured record of what is actually standing.

Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner produces that record in one visit. Each setup captures millions of survey-grade points, so a building envelope, the sidewalk and curb line, the adjacent structures, and the overhead conditions are documented together instead of measured piecemeal across separate trips. For infrastructure the same instrument does harder work. We observe a control network across the site, tie every scan position to it, and deliver structural as-builts, vertical clearance surveys, and repeat epochs that can be differenced against a baseline to detect movement. The BART Richmond line runs on elevated structure through El Cerrito with the Ohlone Greenway beneath it, and Cerrito and Baxter Creeks pass under the street grid in culverts and crossings. Structures like those are exactly what control-tied, survey-grade scanning is for, and they are the reason we treat a point cloud as a coordinate framework rather than a picture.

Deliverables are the registered point cloud in E57 or RCP, scan-to-CAD plans, sections and elevations in DWG or DXF, Revit models at LOD 200 or 300, and coordinates on the datum your engineer specifies. For bridges, aerial structures, tanks, and other high-accuracy work see our infrastructure scanning; for buildings, our El Cerrito as-built surveys; and for the ground surface, El Cerrito topographic surveys.