3D Scanning in Stockton, CA

Stockton is an inland seaport, and that shapes a lot of its building stock. The Port of Stockton opened on February 2, 1933, at the head of the Stockton Deepwater Shipping Channel, which runs 41 miles from Suisun Bay and is maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers. The port sits on about 4,200 acres with 15 berths and up to 7.7 million square feet of warehouse storage, handling dry and liquid bulk and breakbulk cargo. Its West Complex on Rough and Ready Island was a World War II Navy supply depot, transferred to the port between 2000 and 2003. Warehouses, transit sheds, and bulk-handling structures of that age rarely match whatever drawings survive, and a tenant fitting new conveyors, racking, or tanks needs real clear heights, column lines, and slab elevations first. The port advertises access to two transcontinental railroads, so track, loading docks, and the buildings beside them often have to be captured in one coordinate system.

Downtown has its own problems. Charles Weber founded the city in 1849, and it was incorporated in 1850 as a supply point for the gold fields. Hotel Stockton, a 1910 Mission Revival building by E.B. Brown, has been on the National Register since 1981, and the Fox California Theatre, now the Bob Hope Theatre, dates from 1930. University of the Pacific has been on its 175-acre Stockton campus since 1924. Buildings like these get re-used, re-wired, and seismically upgraded, and every one of those projects starts with measured existing conditions. The water is the third factor. The Lower San Joaquin River Project, led by the Corps with the Central Valley Flood Protection Board, the Department of Water Resources, and the San Joaquin Area Flood Control Agency, is strengthening 23 miles of levee along the San Joaquin and Calaveras rivers, starting with the Tenmile Slough levee beside Brookside in April 2025. Sites near the levees need topography and structure capture on the same datum.

Every job starts with control. We set primary GNSS control, carry secondary control with a Trimble S3 total station, and tie each Trimble X9 setup to that network, processed in Trimble Business Center in US survey feet and held to 0.01 US survey feet relative to project control. You get a registered, cleaned point cloud (E57, LAS, or RCP), scan-to-CAD plans, sections, elevations, 3D linework and coded points, and a report stating the control basis, units, and accuracy achieved. Contour Survey is based in Lotus, in El Dorado County, so Stockton work is planned as a mobilization with the field days scheduled together. See 3D laser scanning, construction verification, as-built surveys, scanning in Lodi and Tracy, and our Stockton surveying page.