3D Scanning in Petaluma, CA

Petaluma has one of the best-preserved nineteenth-century commercial downtowns in Northern California, and preservation is what drives much of the scanning work here. The iron-front and brick buildings along Petaluma Boulevard and Kentucky Street are unreinforced masonry, and the retrofit, restoration, and reuse projects moving through them all need the same starting point: a measured record of a building that is out of plumb, out of square, and largely undrawn. A scanner records the storefront cast-iron rhythm, the party walls, the floor and mezzanine levels, and the roof framing in one visit, without touching historic fabric, and the point cloud becomes the reference every consultant on the project measures from.

The river runs through everything else. The Petaluma River carries a working turning basin through the middle of town, the D Street bascule bridge and the downtown street crossings span it, the rail bridge serves the SMART corridor that stops downtown and at north Petaluma, and a broad FEMA floodplain surrounds all of it. Those are control-network jobs: we set and observe survey control on published horizontal and vertical datums, register the scans to it, and deliver clearance envelopes for movable and fixed spans, structural as-builts of decks, trusses, abutments, and floodwalls, and baseline epochs a later scan can be compared against. Elevations referenced to NAVD88 are what make the data usable for flood and hydraulic review rather than just for looks.

Outside the growth boundary, dairy and agricultural operations add creameries, processing buildings, and long-span farm structures to the list. Deliverables throughout are registered E57 or RCP point clouds, DWG/DXF plans, sections, and elevations, and Revit models. Filings arising from the control work go through the Sonoma County Surveyor in Santa Rosa. See infrastructure scanning and our Petaluma as-built surveys.