3D Scanning in Yuba City, CA

Yuba City incorporated in 1908, is the Sutter County seat, and counted 70,117 residents in the 2020 census. The Feather River runs along its east side, and the Sutter Buttes rise out of the valley floor to the northwest. The town's buildings follow its orchards. Sunsweet Growers, a cooperative founded in 1917 as the California Prune and Apricot Growers Association, is headquartered here and operates what it describes as the largest dried fruit plant in the world, and the area has a long history of peach and prune processing. Plants like these grow by addition: a new dryer line, a cold storage room, a packing hall built onto an older one. Before the next addition, the engineer needs to know where the existing structure, equipment, and utilities actually are, and a scan of the plant gives plans, sections, and 3D linework of that space in one mobilization.

Water shapes the rest. A levee break on the Feather River in December 1955 flooded the area and killed 38 people. Today the Sutter Butte Flood Control Agency's Feather River West Levee Project covers 44 miles of levee from the Thermalito Afterbay south to the Sutter Bypass, much of it repaired with slurry cutoff walls, some as deep as 130 feet, to give 200-year protection to Biggs, Gridley, Live Oak, and most of Yuba City. Bridges, pump stations, and drainage structures near those levees are the kind of thing agencies and their engineers scan to record condition and compare over time. Across the river, Marysville sits inside its own ring of levees, and its Bok Kai Temple, built in 1880 and on the National Register since 1975, is one of many older masonry buildings there that need careful existing-conditions drawings before any repair. On new plant steel we verify anchor bolts and structural steel to 1/8 inch, with total station check shots on any bolt group near tolerance.

We hold control to 0.01 US survey feet relative to project control, with primary GNSS control and secondary control by Trimble S3 total station. Scans come from a Trimble X9 and are 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. Yuba City is a longer trip north from our El Dorado County base than our Sacramento work, so we plan the field days to cover everything in one visit, and when a client has work on both sides of the river we combine Yuba City and Marysville sites into the same trip. Because every setup is checked against control in the field, gaps are caught before we leave. See 3D laser scanning, as-built surveys, scanning in the North State, and our Yuba City surveying page.