Pallet racking in Katy, TX.

Often not, and it is worth checking before a permit submittal rather than after. Katy straddles Harris, Fort Bend and Waller counties, and a large amount of property with a Katy mailing address is in unincorporated county territory or in another jurisdiction entirely. This matters for racking because the reviewing office and the high-piled combustible storage threshold both follow the parcel: unincorporated Harris County requires a construction permit and an operational permit above 500 square feet of high-piled storage, where the City of Houston requires an operational permit above 2,500. We verify jurisdiction from the parcel at the start of a project.

Start from the sprinkler design and the SKU profile, not the roof height. In an ESFR-protected Class A building the sprinkler certification sets the flue spacing, the maximum storage height and often the rack depth, so those are inputs rather than variables. Within that, a broad SKU profile with many slow movers usually lands on taller selective with a carton-flow or pick-module face; a narrow profile with high velocity justifies push-back or pallet flow; genuinely homogeneous product can support drive-in. We size from your pallet count, velocity data and lift-truck fleet and produce a CAD layout before anything is ordered.

Yes, though for a different reason than an older building. A new Class A slab is documented and sound, but Greater Houston sits on high-plasticity Beaumont Formation clay that swells and shrinks seasonally, so even a good slab can move differentially over time. We confirm the slab detail and any post-tensioning from the building documents before drilling — post-tension cable mapping is required before any anchor goes in where PT is present — and we set the anchor specification against the real slab rather than a catalogue default.