Topographic Surveys in Crockett, CA

Crockett may be the most vertical community we survey in Contra Costa County. The early-1900s company town of the C&H Sugar refinery climbs the bluffs above the Carquinez Strait on steep, narrow streets, with small terraced lots stacked one above another and generations of retaining walls holding it all in place. This is the environment where terrestrial laser scanning stops being a nicer way to do topography and becomes close to the only practical way. A conventional crew working pole-and-prism on a Crockett hillside faces walls too tall to shoot over, terraces hidden from any single setup, and slopes where every point is earned slowly and a few hundred shots must stand in for a complicated surface. Our Trimble scanner instead captures millions of survey-grade points per setup — wall faces, wall tops and toes, stair runs, terrace grades, roof lines, and the street itself — and we register the setups into one seamless point cloud in a single site visit.

That density matters because most Crockett projects are really retaining-wall projects in disguise. Additions, ADUs, deck replacements, and drainage repairs on terraced lots all interact with existing walls whose height, batter, and condition drive the structural design. From the point cloud we deliver true wall profiles and cross-sections at any station your engineer chooses, alongside one-foot contours, spot elevations, and a vegetation-filtered terrain model of the slopes between terraces. Down toward the waterfront, low-lying margins fall within zones mapped under the Seismic Hazards Mapping Act, and we reference those surveys to a recognized vertical datum for geotechnical review. Crockett is unincorporated, so permits run through Contra Costa County, with records research at the County Recorder and Surveyor offices in Martinez.

Where construction on these tight lots risks disturbing old property corners, California Business and Professions Code §8771 requires that monuments be preserved or perpetuated before the work destroys them — a step we handle through our monument preservation service alongside the topo.