Activity Feed › Discussion Forums › Strictly Surveying › Disgustingly survey related
Disgustingly survey related
Posted by just-a-surveyor on October 8, 2019 at 4:12 pmSo there I was, heading in the general direction of my truck and shooting fence line as I go when the smell of rotting flesh hits me. Oh good lord it is bad and then I see the parts and pieces of a horse laying around the area. I curse my lot in life as I try and take shallow breaths and get through the area and then I sink into a mess.
Oh it was terrible, I sunk up to my boot tops in the shallow grave of a rotting horse that had died and was buried and the coyotes had pulled off what they could and the attempts at covering it had not been very good as I broke through the earthen crust and into the yuk.
I saved the GPS rover though my boots are outside after having been hosed off and scrubbed.
rochs01 replied 4 years, 7 months ago 17 Members · 27 Replies- 27 Replies
UGH!! I hated doing work on the side of highways because of roadkill. I was very happy when we stopped doing DOT work. I have burried my share of farm animals, and I go rent a excavator, and burry them several feet deep.
I had that happen with the remains of a dead black bear in Alaska. I asked the crew chief what the hell smelled so bad, and he said “you’re standing in it!” Luckily it was a little more long gone than your find. ugh…
I had a project at the sewage treatment lagoons in Fairview, OK. As if that wasn’t bad enough…on a return trip we found a pile of very dead cattle piled on top of a very critical control point. We eventually got “public works” (1 man) to drive the rubber tired backhoe out there and scoop them over. It still didn’t make working there any better…just a little less “moist”..
I threw away a darned good pair of boots before driving home. It took a week to get that smell out of my nose.
You guys make my experiences pale by comparison. There is a bench mark that is forever recorded in my mind as “Dead Raccoon Culvert” from my first recovery there. But the carcass was rotted or carried away before I went back to do the GPS session.
.I have a Dodge Challenger I only drive once in a while. Earlier this summer I took it shopping and left a bag that had 2lbs of hamburger and two New York strips in the trunk, for a week. Not good, but the car is getting back to normal smelling.
While working for the local DOT we were regularly passed by trucking from the local rendering plat.
Then had a job AT a local rendering plant. UGH!
- Posted by: @david-livingstone
I have a Dodge Challenger I only drive once in a while. Earlier this summer I took it shopping and left a bag that had 2lbs of hamburger and two New York strips in the trunk, for a week. Not good, but the car is getting back to normal smelling.
Years ago a buddy of mine was getting married and knew we were going to try and prank him. His prized possession was his (at that time) new 1970 Plymouth Road Runner. We found out he was hiding it behind his future in-laws house to keep us from “decorating” it in honor of his nuptials.
A 3 pound channel catfish placed on top of his air cleaner seemed like an appropriate joke…until we realized they had taken his new wife’s Mustang for the honeymoon and were unable to get back over there to remove the fish. It stayed there a week or so.
He finally started talking again to us all after about six months..
Remnants of a couple hundred fileted-out fish were dumped at the edge of the county road right where we needed to set up in order to see what needed to be seen to move on with our survey.
- Posted by: @holy-cow
Remnants of a couple hundred fileted-out fish were dumped at the edge of the county road right where we needed to set up in order to see what needed to be seen to move on with our survey.
Here’s a pic of a little hamlet east of here named “Pink”. All that’s really there is a church and a flea market. I’ve always wondered how “Fishmarket Road” got its name. Especially in the middle of the scrubby cross-timbers with no body of water anywhere around. Maybe what you’ve described is a clue.
Mostly I see – and smell – dead iguanas. There are some but far less feral goats, donkeys and pigs.
Doing first order subsidence leveling in the middle of winter. The Benchmarks iron rods set around 15 feet down, and protected by water pipe from lawn mowers, etc where they protruded threw ground. We came upon one that was totally full of ice, so grabbed our ground axe and started chopping away. After about 2 inches, we saw it wasn’t just full of ice, but also a skunk that had fallen in, couldn’t get out, and met its maker. So three of us took turns, while the other gagged, chopping through the skunk so we could get to the bench mark.
Fun times.
Well, now, you see, young’un, back in 1908 Bob Fishmarket and his family emigrated from the Boston, Massachusetts area and put down roots to last. He was a wonderful fellow and a mover and shaker at getting Pink to grow in those early days. The other founders gladly named the road passing his home in his honor.
(See, you aren’t the only yarnspinner in the bunch.)
.
.
.
As our counties have gone about applying 911 addresses throughout the rural areas all sorts of names have been applied. Some are States, some have an historic tie to the area, some are animals, so forth and so on. Generally, these begin with one side of the county having a road name that begins with the letter “a” and then proceed through the alphabet in order towards the far side of the county. That can work fairly well until you run into a difficult letter/topic combination. In an animal name county, Quail Road may exist. In a State name county, they might jump over any missing letter such as “q” and “x”. Some of the stranger ones include: X-ray Road and Unique Road
The worst thing that I was ever around was excrement that was brought in from Detroit, Michigan and had been sprayed on several hundred acres halfway between Linden and Jefferson, Tx.
The city of Detroit City Sewer guy came up with a solution to their under sized sewer plant and got some idiot in Texas to market their surplus as fertilizer.
It took putting that on two large fields in Cass County for it to be banned so fast they had to turn delivery trucks around that were already on their way here.
That stuff took a very long time to leave the air.
It was puking time to happen upon the first day and afterward we drove miles around to not let that happen again.
So let me get this straight, poo was trucked from Detroit to somewhere in East Texas and sprayed on the fields.
Would it be safe to assume that this treated effluent or was it straight up raw sewage?
You have got to go into more detail.
So let me get this straight, poo was trucked from Detroit to somewhere in East Texas and sprayed on the fields.
Would it be safe to assume that this treated effluent or was it straight up raw sewage?
You have got to go into more detail.
Injecting treated effluent sludge into farmland use to be a big deal around here. They used 18-wheel tank trucks with big injector plow nozzles on the rear. And someone had to measure the acreage to keep in line with the EPA…enter the surveyor…
That was some of the stinkiest gut-wrenching work I ever did. I just threw up a little in my mouth. No wait, I just threw up A LOT.
My, Pink has a very nice writeup on Wikipedia. I like the thought that it had a sister city named Brown a short distance away. BTW, there was also a Violet in Pott County. Romulus and Remus are interesting town names, as well. Pink has a population above 2000. The town hall is a half mile south of the highway.
Checking the aerial view shows the southern terminus of Fishmarket Road is a stone’s throw from Pecan Creek. Perhaps that has something to do with the name.
What is odd is that Fishmarket Road is one of the few roads running north/south with a name instead of a number as the primary label. I like the road a mile to the east named Okay Road. Not sure if that is a play on OK or an indicator of the quality of the road. Going north from the highway, the first road to the east is Old Barn Road.
Makes me think of the job that the firm I worked for in 1960 had a job doing the topo of the berms between the blood pools at a local meat packing plant in August when the deer flies and mosquitoes were like dive bombers , let alone the really ripe smell. :whew:
- Posted by: @holy-cow
My, Pink has a very nice writeup on Wikipedia. I like the thought that it had a sister city named Brown a short distance away. BTW, there was also a Violet in Pott County. Romulus and Remus are interesting town names, as well. Pink has a population above 2000. The town hall is a half mile south of the highway.
Checking the aerial view shows the southern terminus of Fishmarket Road is a stone’s throw from Pecan Creek. Perhaps that has something to do with the name.
What is odd is that Fishmarket Road is one of the few roads running north/south with a name instead of a number as the primary label. I like the road a mile to the east named Okay Road. Not sure if that is a play on OK or an indicator of the quality of the road. Going north from the highway, the first road to the east is Old Barn Road.
You’ve touched on a long-running feud with the inhabitants of Pink. Whether it’s Okay Road or Walker Road depends on who you ask. You will note on the map in the link the majority of roads are gravel.
Okay Rd. is the a N-S thoroughfare due to its asphalt surface. It’s historically called Walker Road because the Walker family was at one time the only residents in there. “If you weren’t a Walker you were probably married to one” as the saying goes. And the Walker’s didn’t cotton to outsiders or any governmental influence and as the area’s population grew the Walker’s were known for their inability to accept a neighbor.
The Walker blood eventually was thinned by amorous neighbors and there are few real Walker families left in the area nowadays. Some residents resented the name Walker Road because they felt it gave the Walker family some sort of “claim” on the area. When visitors would ask directions about how to get south of the highway they would ask the condition of the road and get the answer, it’s okay. Hence Okay Road. OK Church on the grounds of the old The Willow View Missionary School for Indians was named for the road, not the other way around. As a side note there is an almost 100 year old tie from the old native stone fence to the section corner there.
Interestingly that section line road is still called Walker Road north of State Highway 9…outside of the Pink city limits where no one named Walker ever owned any land.
Log in to reply.