Do civil sheets need utility coordination review?

Yes — crossings of storm, sanitary, water, and dry utilities are where conflicts live. Check every crossing with both inverts shown.

What should match the survey?

Property lines, easements, existing elevations, and benchmark references — discrepancies here invalidate everything downstream.

Plan Review Checklists

Civil Plan Review Checklist

Short answer

Reviewing civil plans means checking that grading and drainage tie into existing conditions, that utilities do not conflict with each other or with structures, that accessible routes work, and that stormwater and erosion controls are complete.

Civil sheets connect the design to the real world: existing grades, existing utilities, property lines, and the public right-of-way. The failure modes are at the interfaces — a finished floor that cannot drain to the street, a storm pipe that crosses a water main at the same invert.

A good civil review walks the project boundary and the utility corridors systematically, then checks the site plan against the survey and the governing land development code.

What a review of civil plans checks

Grading ties into existing elevations — no unrealistic slopes or abrupt tie-ins.
Drainage paths are continuous; stormwater has a legal, designed outfall.
Utility crossings checked for vertical conflicts — storm vs water vs sanitary.
Accessible routes meet grade, cross-slope, and clearance requirements.
Erosion and sediment control shown for the full disturbed area.
Site dimensions, bearings, and easements consistent with the survey.
Driveway geometry, sight distance, and connection details at the roadway.
Existing conditions labelled — demolition vs protection is unambiguous.

Interface failures are the pattern

Civil findings concentrate where the project meets existing infrastructure: pipe invert conflicts at crossings, grading that leaves a wall of earth at the property line, accessible routes broken by a 2% cross-slope over a drainage swale. Review by tracing each utility and contour line through its crossings.

Where AI review helps

Notes, callouts, and schedules on civil sheets contradict each other more often than the linework does. PDFDepth’s AI Plan Review reads the whole set and flags mismatches — an invert on the profile that disagrees with the plan callout — with sheet citations for a reviewer to confirm.