3D Scanning in Redding, CA

Redding is the Shasta County seat, incorporated in 1887, and sits just downstream of two major federal dams. Shasta Dam, built by the Bureau of Reclamation from 1938 to 1945, is a concrete arch-gravity dam 602 feet high with a crest 3,460 feet long, the main piece of the federal Central Valley Project; a temperature control device with 15 shutters was added in 1991 to manage water temperature for salmon. About two miles northwest of town, Keswick Dam, finished in 1950 and 157 feet high, works as an afterbay regulating releases from Shasta. In town, the Sundial Bridge at Turtle Bay, designed by Santiago Calatrava and opened on July 4, 2004, crosses 700 feet of the Sacramento River from a 217-foot pylon without touching the water, a design meant to protect the salmon spawning grounds below. Documenting structures like these is work for the owners and their engineers, done under their access and security rules, and it depends on control: targets tied to the project network so one epoch can be compared with the next.

Most Redding scanning is buildings. Mercy Medical Center and Shasta Regional Medical Center are among the city's largest employers, and hospital renovation is a strong case for scanning: occupied floors, crowded ceiling space, and short access windows, all captured once without contact. Downtown, the Cascade Theatre opened in 1935 as an Art Deco theatre, was listed on the National Register in 2002, and reopened in 2004 after restoration; the Market Street redevelopment reworked the blocks around it. Buildings of that age need measured floor plans, sections, and elevations before design starts. The 2018 Carr Fire destroyed more than 1,100 buildings, and rebuilding and repair on damaged sites still calls for existing-conditions data. For new commercial and industrial buildings, we verify anchor bolts and structural steel to 1/8 inch from the scan, with total station check shots on any bolt group near tolerance, and map slabs for deviation and levelness.

Redding is a real trip from our base in Lotus, El Dorado County, and we treat it that way: scope and access settled ahead of time, control set first, and field days booked so coverage is finished in one mobilization. Where a client has more than one site in Shasta County, we schedule them back to back on the same trip. Control is primary GNSS with secondary Trimble S3 total station, held to 0.01 US survey feet relative to project control; scans are Trimble X9, processed in Trimble Business Center in US survey feet. Deliverables are a registered, cleaned point cloud (E57, LAS, or RCP), scan-to-CAD plans, sections, elevations, 3D linework and coded points, and a report stating control basis, units, and accuracy achieved. See 3D laser scanning, as-built surveys, scanning across the North State, and scanning in Chico.