Using the Grading tools, she laid out a conceptual road. She defined a template: 12-foot lanes, 4-foot shoulders, 2:1 side slopes. With a few clicks, Land Desktop calculated the proposed surface. Then came the command she’d been waiting for: Compute Volumes.
He walked away. Sarah saved her file: Maple_Creek_Phase3.dwg . She leaned back, looked at the clean, precise lines on her screen—the contours, the alignments, the parcel boundaries.
The software hummed. The hard drive clicked. A dialog box appeared. Autodesk AutoCAD 2004 --land Desktop -civil Design
By Thursday at 4 PM, she had it all: a base map, a contour exhibit, a grading plan, a utility layout, and a detailed cut/fill table. She printed the final sheet on the old HP DesignJet. The ink was still wet when Henderson walked by again.
At 2 PM, Henderson shuffled over. "How's the disaster?" he asked, not unkindly. Using the Grading tools, she laid out a conceptual road
Sarah’s jaw dropped. The balance was almost perfect. The old design from Phase 2 had required trucking in 8,000 yards of fill, a budget-busting disaster. Her design, following the land’s natural ridge, was dirt-neutral.
He stared at the cut/fill numbers. A long silence. Then, the corner of his mouth twitched. It wasn't a smile—Henderson didn't smile—but it was close. "You know," he said, folding the plan carefully, "when I started, we did this with a slide rule and a planimeter. Took two weeks." Then came the command she’d been waiting for:
"Oh, you sneaky valley," she whispered.
The others in the office treated Land Desktop like a necessary evil. They used it to import a point file, draw a few polylines, then export everything back to vanilla AutoCAD to "do the real work." Sarah knew better. She’d spent the summer learning the Terrain Model Explorer, the Contour tools, and the mysterious COGO input system that everyone else feared.
Her boss, a grizzled veteran named Mr. Henderson who still missed his drafting board, had given her the impossible. "Maple Creek Estates," he'd grunted, tossing a thick folder onto her desk. "Phase 3. The old as-builts are a mess, the plat map is from 1972, and the developer wants cut/fill numbers by Friday. It’s Tuesday."
He picked up the plan. He traced the new cul-de-sac with his finger. He looked at the proposed contours, then back at the old survey points. He grunted.