Construction Surveying and Facility Locating in Terrace, Prince Rupert and Kitimat

Three towns, three different sites

Terrace, Prince Rupert and Kitimat sit within about 150 kilometres of each other on the Highway 16 and 37 corridors, and a crew can work all three in a week. But they are not the same job.

Prince Rupert is a port. Terminal work happens at the tide line, on fill, on pile-supported structures, beside rail. Control has to account for settlement, and the utilities under a working terminal belong to a dozen owners across sixty years of construction.

Kitimat is a plant town. Large industrial sites, heavy process infrastructure, and brownfield ground where the drawings stopped matching reality decades ago. The locating work here is as much archaeology as it is engineering.

Terrace is the hub. Housing, civil works, institutional buildings, and the yards and laydowns that feed the projects on either side of it. More conventional construction surveying — but a lot of it, on tight schedules, in a town where every surveyor is already busy.

The common thread is terrain and weather. Steep ground, heavy timber, 2,500 millimetres of rain a year on the coast, and long drives between sites. Field time is expensive here. Wasted field time is very expensive.

Construction surveying on northwest BC projects

Construction surveying turns a set of drawings into marks on the ground that a crew can build to. On a major project in this region it runs through four stages.

Control. Establishing horizontal and vertical control that every contractor on the site works from, checking it against published monuments, and re-checking it through the life of the project. On a multi-year industrial site this control outlives several of the people who set it. It has to be documented well enough that the next surveyor can pick it up cold.

Layout. Gridlines, building corners, column lines, footings and foundations, anchor bolts, slab edges, road centrelines and curb, ditch lines, utility alignments and inverts — staked ahead of the crew so nobody is waiting on the survey truck. On sites with several trades working at once, layout is a scheduling problem as much as a measurement one.

Grade and earthworks. Cut and fill staking, subgrade and base checks, and volume surveys for material moved. On sloped coastal sites the earthworks quantity is frequently the biggest variable in the budget, and the survey is what turns an argument about it into a number.

As-builts. Recording what was actually built, where, and at what elevation. For the owner, for the engineer of record, for the regulator where there is one, and for the next contractor who has to dig near it.

Facility locating: what the public locate does not cover

A public utility locate covers utilities owned by the utility companies, generally to the property line or the meter. Everything past that point is the owner's problem. On an industrial site, a terminal, a plant or a municipal works yard, that is most of what is underground.

Facility locating is the work of finding and marking that private infrastructure before anything is dug. On northwest BC sites it typically means:

Power distribution between buildings and to equipment. Site lighting circuits. Communications, fibre and instrumentation cable. Process piping. Natural gas beyond the meter. Water mains and fire loops. Sanitary and storm systems. Cathodic protection. And the abandoned lines that were cut, capped and left in place — which show up on no drawing and stop no excavator.

PCI traces and marks conductive lines with electromagnetic locating equipment. Where the target is non-conductive, or where the site history is uncertain, ground-penetrating radar scans the ground directly. Sewer camera and sonde locating traces gravity systems that have no conductor to follow. The results are marked on the ground, and where the client needs it, picked up by survey and delivered as a drawing the project can build from.

Most of the industrial ground in the northwest is legacy ground. The line that was not on the drawing is the one that gets hit.

Why the stakes are higher on a major project

The cost of a utility strike scales with the site. On a residential lot it is a repair bill and a bad afternoon. On a port, a plant or a highway corridor it can be a service interruption to an operating facility, an environmental release, a safety investigation, a regulatory report, and a schedule impact that follows the project to the end.

Layout errors scale the same way. A control problem found at as-built is a change order and an argument. The same problem found during layout is a re-stake.

On this scale of work, accurate field data early is not overhead. It is the cheapest risk control on the job.

Mobilizing across the region

Projects in the northwest regularly span more than one of these towns, and some sit well off the paved network. PCI plans mobilization, equipment and communications as part of the scope rather than as an afterthought — including for sites where access is by forest service road, barge or helicopter.

PCI Surveys is First Nations-owned. On projects carrying Indigenous procurement or participation requirements, that means a defined technical scope delivered by the company, not a name added to a proposal. Details are on our First Nations partnerships page.

Services in Terrace, Prince Rupert and Kitimat

Construction surveying and layout · site control · topographic surveys · private utility locating · facility locating · ground-penetrating radar and concrete scanning · sewer camera and sonde locating · drone mapping and photogrammetry · drone LiDAR · volumes and earthworks · as-built surveys.

Related: construction surveying in Prince George, private line locating, GPR scanning, drone LiDAR in northern BC, and the coverage map.

Get a price for your northwest BC project

Tell us the site, the scope and the timing, and in most cases you will see a price as soon as you submit. Attach drawings if you have them, or outline the area on the map. The more complete the picture, the faster and more accurate the quote.

Request a quote or call the office nearest your project. Crews are out seven days a week, 6 a.m. to 7 p.m.