Topographic Surveys in Kensington, CA

Kensington has no city hall — building permits, grading permits, and planning review all run through Contra Costa County, and county staff routinely ask for a current topographic survey before they will process hillside work. Nearly every lot here qualifies as hillside work: the community sits on steep slopes laced with narrow streets, and the Blakemont slow-moving landslide area on the El Cerrito border is the canonical local hazard. When a geotechnical engineer is retained to evaluate a Kensington slope, the first thing they need is an accurate base map — contours, spot elevations, existing retaining walls, drainage paths — and that base map is what we deliver. Our topographic surveys include 1-foot contours, a digital terrain model, spot elevations at grade breaks, and DWG/DXF files your engineer and architect can design on directly.

The terrain is exactly where our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner earns its keep. A conventional topo crew shoots a few hundred points one at a time, climbing the slope with a rod; we capture millions of survey-grade points in a single visit, then filter vegetation from the point cloud to extract a true ground model even where ivy, oaks, and mature plantings cover the slope. That density matters on Kensington's mid-century homes-on-slopes, where a driveway, a wall, and a daylight basement can stack within a few feet of vertical relief — and it means one mobilization instead of return trips up a street with no place to park. The full point cloud comes with the deliverable, so later questions get answered from data we already hold.

All record filings for Kensington — records of survey, corner records — go through the Contra Costa County Recorder and County Surveyor. If your project also needs property lines resolved for setbacks, we can combine scopes; see our boundary and topographic surveys for the combined product most hillside permit sets actually require.