Meridian Hills

City of Moorpark

The Meridian Hills project was a grading project of mammoth proportions. The project underwent 7 million cubic yards of earth movement and experienced a discovery find of an Ancestral Mammoth.

The 350-acre site was designed for a community featuring 265 homes with a private recreational facility with a community building, entertainment/picnic areas and pool as well as separate tot lot and a tennis court facility. Other public and private recreational improvements include over a mile of multi use trails and a multi-use trailhead parking lot emphasizing equestrian uses.

Hall & Foreman providing the grading design for this hillside site. The existing site consisted of many steep hillsides with some rolling terrain. The average gradient was 7% with some areas of over 50%. In order to create the 265 building pads averaging 7,000 square feet each, substantial grading was required.

The mass and stability grading for the site totaled 7 million cubic yards of earth movement. Over 26,000 cubic yards of soil was moved on the average per dwelling unit making this project one of the most expensive per unit grading projects of its size in Southern California’s history. During grading, an Ancestral Mammoth was unearthed and spotted by a full-time project resident paleontologist. The Ancestral Mammoth is a species older than a Woolly Mammoth.