TIL the old brick factory near my town is now a drone mapping site

I drove past the old Carter Brickworks outside of Springfield yesterday and saw a crew flying drones over the empty lot. They had a trailer set up with a big screen showing a 3D model of the ground in real time. It's wild to think that place used to be full of guys mixing mortar by hand... now it's all about digital surveys before a single shovel hits the dirt. Has anyone else worked on a site where the old way and the new tech are literally on the same ground?

3 comments

3 Comments

joseph_murray83h ago

Drove past a place like that up near St. Louis a few years back. It was an old grain silo complex that had been sitting empty for decades. They had a drone buzzing around the top of the tallest silo and this guy on the ground with a tablet was literally watching a heat map of the whole structure, looking for weak spots in the concrete from all the way back in the 1920s. The weirdest part was there was still an old wooden ladder nailed to the side of one silo from back when someone had to climb up and check the grain levels by hand. Just kind of stared at that ladder while the drone did its thing, felt like two different worlds standing in the same wind. Did the crew have any old equipment sitting around that they were just ignoring in plain sight?

adams.harper2mo ago

Honestly that's pretty cool. Did they say what they're mapping it for? Like is it for a new building or just checking the land?

shane2442mo ago

Kinda sad though, feels like we're losing the history of the place for a digital copy.