Topographic Surveys in Moraga, CA

Moraga sits on a stack of geology that makes topographic accuracy more than a formality: Moraga Formation volcanics over Orinda Formation sediments, a combination associated with well-documented landslide activity on the town's developed slopes. The Town of Moraga reviews hillside additions, ADUs, grading, and retaining walls with that history in mind, and a current topographic survey — typically paired with a geotechnical report — is the standard entry ticket. We produce the base map both reviews rely on: 1-foot contours, a digital terrain model, spot elevations, existing walls and drainage, all in DWG/DXF layers your design team uses directly.

Much of Moraga's housing is 1960s–70s ranch subdivisions built on graded pads cut into hillsides, with open-space boundaries running along the semi-rural edges. Those graded pads and the slopes above and below them are where movement shows up first — a bowed retaining wall, a settling corner, a drainage swale that no longer drains. Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner documents all of it at millimeter-level precision, capturing millions of points across the pad, the slope, and every improvement in a single visit rather than the few hundred shots a conventional crew collects. Where mature landscaping covers the slope, we classify the point cloud and filter vegetation to extract a bare-earth model, so contours stay honest under the canopy. If a slope is suspected of active movement, the archived point cloud also gives your geotech a rigorous baseline; our monitoring surveys can repeat the scan and quantify change over time.

Filings for Moraga work — records of survey, corner records — go through the Contra Costa County Recorder and County Surveyor. We keep every topographic map on a defined datum and coordinate basis so the geotech report, the grading plan, and any later record documents all reference the same ground.