Activity Feed › Discussion Forums › Strictly Surveying › How wet is too wet to survey
I started my career on our West Coast.
Its climate is a little like your Pacific North West – ie Sub Tropical rain forest.
Back then, we would get paid extra for “wet time” – defined as starting when we felt the first drop of water run down between the shoulder blades
Somewhere between waist and chest deep. That is for swamp surveys.
@His most holiest of Bovines and God of methane: to answer your op: When it’s raining.
Rain in FL usually happens in the afternoon. The easterly winds from the Gulf of Mexico collide with the Southeasterly winds from the Atlantic and create horrendous thunderstorms over central Florida. If a front is visually approaching and that usually means visible at 10 miles or so we pack it in. Lightning can strike miles ahead of an approaching storm. When I was employed in South Florida we had a party chief killed and a rodman severely injured when lightning struck a 200?? chain they were at each end of. The party chief was killed instantly. The rodman suffered third degree burns on his legs and feet, the lightning ripped his jeans in half and blew off both his shoes.
After that depressing episode I??ve instructed all my crews when they see approaching black clouds get in the truck until the thing blows over which is usually 30-45 min or so. Mother Nature is sneaky so treat her with respect. You might live longer. ????
Electricity in the air is normally connected to our storms that fire up in the high plains in the summer. We are lucky that we have big sky’s and can keep a look out for them. It’s rare that we get rain without thunder. Rain fine, thunder, start looking to get out.
I’ve gotten a light shock before when picking up the base radio antenna, you know it was passed time when that happens.
That is why you can turn the touch screen off.
Touch screen works well enough. Sarge’s 2nd sentence is probably the operative one.
I work in South Alabama, gets more rain than Seattle, so working in the rain is just SOP. I use a pop up tent, over the instrument, with the legs nailed down. The Mesa has it’s own umbrella, notched to fit through the prism rod, found out the hard way no, in spite of the marketing, they are not waterproof. Ponchos and rubber boots, and rock on.
The no go in rain is the GPS unit, while I use an RPN connection to the CORS network, is too expensive to risk getting wet.
- Posted by: P.L.Parsons
I work in South Alabama, gets more rain than Seattle, so working in the rain is just SOP..
Back in the ’70s I did a load of telecommunications work within a triangle drawn from Houston to Baton Rouge to Shreveport.
It rained. A lot. I grew webbed feet while I was down there. I’ve never seen anywhere else on the planet that a truck could get terminally stuck so quick in that gumbo soil. We once had a truck stuck in the mud so bad the wrecker services wouldn’t touch it. We finally found an outfit named “Thibodaux Bros. Recovery Service” that got it out with a D6 and a dragline on steel tracks. My boss told me I was going to have to drive that same truck for 10 years to offset the cost of getting it out of the mud. 😉
When I worked for a firm in Lake Oswego, if you didn’t work in the rain, you didn’t work. Put on your rain suit, use “Rite in the Rain” field books and get going. The day before Thanksgiving 1989, completly lost the vernier in the T-16 due to moisture buildup in the instrument. Could see the minute portion, but the degrees portion was not even a ghosted outline. After a four day weekend and stting in the instrument room, it was back to normal.
In 1959 when I worked for a firm in Casper, Wyoming after moving there, we were working out in the Gas Hills surveying an open pit uranium mine. One day it clouded up and the sky got dark, but no rain, thunder or lightning. We were running grid lines tying into the walls and berms of an adjacent pit that would be cut out by the mine operations of the pit we were surveying. The transit was set up near the edge of the slope and I was giving the rodman line to set nails at the toe of slope and the edge of the berm at the next level. below. When giving him hand signals for his line, my fingernails would buzz, with a kind of zip-zip sound. I called the party chief over and had him listen to the sound, so he said we’d better get out of there. We tossed a rope down to the rodman and pulled him back up the slope, put everything in the pickup and headed for the trailer we stayed in. The party chief said he’d never heard anything like the zip-zip coming off the end of my fingers.
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