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I Hated To Put A Hole In Their Brand-New Pavement…
But I needed that pipe.
It patched up pretty well, so I don’t think I made anyone mad.
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13 Replies
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Not your fault. They should have provided a monument well.
Nice job.
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hmmmm .. That makes me wonder, if surveyors designed the roads, instead of engineers, would the potholes appear in places where you really need them ? ???¦
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You guys have it too good……monument wells and boxes with actual monuments in them. What a novel idea…….whodathunkit!?
We can’t even get centerline road control. For heaven’s sake we have a pin capping requirements with no consequences if you do not cap your set pins.
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How’d you get it so square?
How deep was the monument? (Below the surface).
Can we buy a tar product, to better glue/seal such patch jobs?
Why didn’t you put a rebar inside the pipe, to elevate monument?
I’ve found 1/2″ pipe, 22″ deep, dug ’em out, put a rebar in the top, and slid another 1/2″ pipe over the rebar, to elevate the monument.
Which reminds me…. I’ve got a patch job I was supposed to do, where I dug out a monument, that’s 2 yrs old….
I’d like to be able to carry a gallon of road tar, and use it to re seal these kind of situations.
Another trick I’ve done is to go off to the r/w, drive a rebar with cap, and use it as a reference monument, with brg dist. I don’t worry about direction, or such… As long as it is clear, and prevents the next surveyor from digging up the road.
Also, I try to place the reference monument in a location that won’t be disturbed. (Good luck with that guesswork!)
And, I like what you did better than “fd Shonstedt zing in pavement”, which is becoming popular, with the next generation…. Carry on!
Nate
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This pipe is actually a lot corner at the right-of-way line of an old state highway. It’s in a private driveway to an old motor court that was long ago converted to de facto affordable housing. A monument well isn’t in the cards for this one.
I dug this with a Bosch 36V hammer drill and 1″ chisel bit. I don’t normally try that with a cordless hammer, as it just doesn’t have the oomph that a corded demo hammer has, but this was fresh pavement and I didn’t want to go to all the bother of loading up a generator. I ran through a battery and a half getting through the 2″ or so of AC. The pipe was down about 0.4 foot, so mostly pavement with a little dirt cover.
I’ll be setting other monuments nearby and filing a Record of Survey, so I’m not concerned about covering the pipe again. The new monuments will provide plenty of reference points.
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Many states have statutes that require preservation of monuments during construction. These usually have provisions requiring monument cases or similar methods to allow for future surveyors access without damaging infrastructure. In these states it is not the responsibility of the surveyor to use their own, or their client’s, money to deal with the failure to follow these rules.
I wish more states would implament rules like this, especially in states like Oklahoma where the majority of original munumentation is buried under roads.
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Back in the day, it was “Found rust ring”.
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Just for fun, here’s a Street View image with an arrow pointing to the approximate location of the pipe:
This is an interesting area, a traditionally low-income neighborhood on the “wrong side of the tracks” (literally) of this otherwise upscale college town. During the course of this survey I stopped a hooker as she was reaching for the door handle of my truck — presumably to take whatever she could grab — while I was across the street setting a control point. In a backyard where I needed to look for another corner I was escorted by the resident, who, while quite friendly, regaled me with tales of his time in prison (27 years in 3 stints), the number of people he’s killed, and the number of times he’s been shot and stabbed. He proudly showed off his pot plants (which he claims are licensed), and even offered me some of the product (I declined). He then proceeded to follow me around for about an hour, talking nonstop. In the motor court there are guys who have lived there for 40 or 50 years, most of whom seem to be former grad students who were unable to launch successful careers and instead retained a minimalist existence. There’s a regular contingent of homeless guys living in the area’s nooks and crannies, a few of whom make a regular lunchtime appearance at the driveway to In-N-Out Burger to solicit spare change. And among all of this there are students living in the more recently-built apartment complexes who move through the area as though its seedy nature doesn’t really exist. It’s a bit of a zoo.
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DOT is almost done adding some fresh paving to a 10-mile stretch of State HWY. We will be removing a patch of the new material in the next few days as we recover the “+” chiseled in the concrete roadbed beneath the fresh asphalt at the quarter corner that is critical to our work. No metallic “zziinngg” to claim in this case.
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I really do not like to dig up road surfaces, especially when I can find the record offset.
Will use a rock drill and 7/8″ bit to bore down and see if it is still there and record the dept before I will actually dig or not.
Several months ago, it was necessary because my initial reading for 3 monuments did not match the offset distance by half a foot.
Turned out that the offsets distances were recorded wrong or else they were set wrong, all the monuments in the road were aligned with other monuments in place along the Headright boundary.
Monuments that fall in a parking lot are a different thing. I like them to wind up at the surface level and I will pull a monument up to be at that elevation using a post puller and Haven’s grip or cable choker.
When that does not work, I like to place a tile of some sort over the monument such as half a brick or a distinctively different color stone.
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DOT is almost done adding some fresh paving to a 10-mile stretch of State HWY. We will be removing a patch of the new material in the next few days as we recover the “+” chiseled in the concrete roadbed beneath the fresh asphalt at the quarter corner that is critical to our work. No metallic “zziinngg” to claim in this case.
A number of years ago I worked for an engineer that was also the local consultant city engineer for the little hamlet of Bethany, OK. Of course we were the “go to” for surveying around town.
There was a concrete N-S street named ‘Peniel Ave.’ through town that was also the quarter line. It held a large number of cut Xs in the concrete that delineated all the small plats that had been filed over the years. We showed up one morning to do some surveying and found Peniel Av. had been overlayed with a inch and a half of beautiful smooth asphalt. The boss told us to chisel them out and be as tidy as we could. We chiseled neat squares and found the Xs we needed. Someone called the police and soon they had the entire crew in custody (the officer followed us to the cop shop 2 blocks away). We were threatened with being charged for “destruction of public property”.
A quick call to the boss and we were released. He had promised to repair the holes we had dug. The local asphalt plant could control the clam-gate on their asphalt silo only so much. The best they could do was to drop about a half ton of hot-mix in the back of the boss’s old Ford PU. We raced out there and patched our holes quickly…and spent the next few hours shoveling the rest of the quickly cooling half ton of asphalt into pot holes at the local Baptist church’s parking lot.
We were hoping to get our prints and mug shots taken but they cut us loose too quick. Mark one up for the local Bethany PD for clearing the streets of some wanton desperado surveyors. 😉
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I was accosted one time by the Director of Public Works for the city of La Habra Heights (I think he was also the deputy dishwasher and chief janitor).
He said he was going to call the sheriff, and I said, “Go ahead”, because then I will make it public that they paved over all the survey points without tying them out (a law in California).
He also told me I had to have an encroachment permit to work in the streets of that city, and a business license to get the permit. Since they are closed on Fridays I did all my work there on Fridays and Saturdays, without the permit or license.
They became a city without a source of revenue. But they got to control development. They have the highest building permit fees in the world. ($12,000 for a reroof permit!!)
I haven’t worked there for a decade or more, and won’t, at any price.
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Wouldn’t make any difference. We work in one county that has done an extensive job placing monuments boxes on section corners and quarter corners but on township maintained roads they get paved over on a regular basis. Last year I dug one out of 2 inches of pavement, went back the next week for some additional work and the black top crew was half a mile away having just paved over it again. Dug it back out of 4 inches of black top, took the still warm pavement and pounded it down half assed so no one on a motor bike would hit it. I figured the Trustees were too cheap/lazy to put risers on. County Engineer said he’d do it if they told him they were paving so lazy it is.
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