The Site Visit That Happens Before the Site Visit
Before your crew pulls permits on a Phase II, someone on the project already knows where the drainage flows, where the loading dock used to be, and which corner of the property has the most utility crossings. They know because they looked. Aerial ortho photos, street-level imagery, historical aerials - these are the first things an experienced consultant pulls, not the last.
The problem is what happens to that knowledge. It sits in someone's head, or in a note on a scratch pad, or in a screenshot buried in a project folder. It doesn't become data. It doesn't show up on a figure. It doesn't get structured into the site characterization that drives boring placement decisions.
That gap between what you can see and what you can cite is where a lot of Phase II work leaves value on the table.
Surface Objects Tell You Where the Problems Are
A catch basin in the northeast corner of a property isn't just a drainage feature. It's a collection point. If the site history shows petroleum storage, machine shops, or dry cleaning operations, that catch basin is a receptor - and its location relative to your proposed boring grid matters.
Manholes tell you where utilities run. Utility poles mark above-grade infrastructure that implies below-grade conduit. Fire hydrant spacing maps water main routing. None of this is interpretation - it's observation. But until recently, making that observation reproducible and mappable required either a field visit or a manual digitizing session in AutoCAD.
LOGitEASY's integration with Mapillary, changes the input method. The platform uses computer vision and machine learning to automatically identify and map surface objects - manholes, catch basins, fire hydrants, water valves, utility poles, and streetlights - from global street-level imagery. The output is a mapped layer, not a screenshot.
A geologist working a brownfield site in a dense urban block can pull surface object locations before the site visit, build a preliminary receptor map, and use that to justify boring placement in the Phase II work plan. The data trail goes into the project record, not into a verbal walkthrough during the kickoff call.
Overlaying Field Intelligence Onto the Map
Street-level imagery captures what exists at ground level. But some of the most useful site data is what your team generates - sketches, annotated drawings, preliminary cross-section lines.
LOGitEASY added the ability to import and overlay images onto aerial or street-view map backgrounds. Engineering line drawings, field sketches, annotated plans - georeferenced, online, without an AutoCAD session required to position a field sketch on a site map.
For Phase II work, this matters at the work plan stage. You can position a hand-drawn drainage flow sketch over an ortho base, confirm it against the Mapillary-detected catch basin locations, and export a figure that shows both the desk-research layer and the field-observation layer in the same deliverable. That is a different kind of document than a PDF annotated in Illustrator.
Most teams currently do this across three or four tools - pulling the aerial in one platform, digitizing in AutoCAD, annotating in Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw, exporting to PDF. Each handoff introduces error and takes time. Keeping those layers in one georeferenced environment cuts the handoff count without requiring anyone to learn a new drafting platform.
What This Changes About Boring Placement
Phase II boring grid design is where all of this converges. The question is always the same: given what you know about this site's history and current surface conditions, where do you put the borings to characterize risk efficiently?
Better surface data produces better grids. A surface object map showing a cluster of catch basins near a former UST area tells you something about preferential pathways. A topo layer showing a topographic depression upgradient of a known release point changes how you think about the sample network.
None of this is new reasoning. Experienced consultants have always done this kind of site reading.
What's new is having tools that make the reading reproducible, citable, and built into the deliverables rather than kept in someone's field notes.
The Mapillary surface object detection and image overlay features are live now. LOGitEASY's free tier is available with no credit card required - if you're managing Phase II work with a small team, the platform is worth reviewing before your next work plan is due.
2026-05-22
