Aurora Water needed a faster, safer way to verify underground water assets across the city’s busiest intersections — traditional surveys required multiple field crews and heavy traffic control, and in 2018 three employees were severely injured working inside a live intersection despite standard safety measures. CompassData partnered with Merrick & Company to replace that approach with mobile mapping on Trimble’s MX7 platform: a single vehicle captured 360-degree georeferenced imagery at each intersection, which was then digitized remotely and synced into Aurora Water’s GIS database, eliminating the need for crews to work in live traffic.
The results spoke for themselves. The process delivered 0.6-foot average accuracy, covered over 160 intersections on a budget originally scoped for 135, and cut traffic control requirements by roughly 85%. The performance was strong enough that Aurora Water expanded the project to include the nearly 4-square-mile Fitzsimmons medical campus — proving mobile mapping could deliver accurate, GIS-ready data while keeping field teams out of harm’s way.
