Post-natural disaster surveying
I was surveying north of the big floods that hit Eastern Kentucky today on an interesting 4,000 acre project and over lunch, saw the President was stopping in to make an appearance at the scene of the disaster. I’m sure there are all kinds of state and federal monies being thrown at the disaster area and I got to wondering about the possibility of re-marking property corners throughout the area as part of the rebuild effort. It would be a huge endeavor but if the right forms were submitted to the right office, I wonder if something like that could be done. I’ve never heard of a large single effort to fix that particular problem from a well funded disaster relief. On the west side of Kentucky last year, a tornado absolutely flattened a town and somebody on this board posted about going back in to stake a lot or two and there wasn’t much to work with. In an area with massive flooding and streets washed out, houses floating away, fences rooted up, I can imagine a huge percentage of property corners have ended up on their way to New Orleans, Mark Twain style. Kentucky does not have any sort of PLSS system and most surveys except for divisions generally aren’t even recorded at the courthouse. County Surveyor is not a paid position and little or nothing in the way of record keeping if anybody even holds the office. Massive lost markers are a real problem and I would guess it will not be addressed but I would love to be involved in a project like that. It seems very “interesting”, sort of like the Chinese curse, “may your life be interesting”.
Has anybody heard of a concerted government sponsored re-monumenting effort after Katrina, Sandy, etc.
- 23 Replies
Tom,
There were funds earmarked for just such an effort in the tornado hit areas.
Surveyors tend to dismiss the utility of having coordinates on boundary corners, but I have always maintained that accurate, well documented coordinates is what is needed is situations like this.
When I worked at the USACE in the early 80’s, all of the large reservoirs I worked on had NAD27 SPC on all of the boundaries, and it was really easy to find when people moved or destroyed our corners, which they sometimes did . We would survey to the cooordinate and find a hole where the monument was.
I go to FIG conferences yearly (going to Warsaw in September), and it seems like we are one of the only countries that discounts the utility of coordinates.
Especially with CORS and RTN’s around the country, we should really be elevating coordinates in the hierarchy. Any boundary work that I have ever done (admittedly not a lot), I always put cm accurate coordinates on whatever I find or set.
@jon-payne
I would love to see how that panned out in Dawson Springs. Did one firm do the whole town or was it piecemeal one lot at a time? That would be a great article if whoever was involved had some literary bent.
For coordinates to belong in the hierarchy above some other things, all surveyors must supply proper metadata and take into account crustal motion over time. We see too many examples on this forum where that wouldn’t be done well due to confusion about datum realizations, grid/ground, etc.
Having coordinates on multiple points in the vicinity could allow relative positioning, but will field crews do the comparison or just read what it says on the data collector with yesterday’s ‘Here” as a basis?
.There was a big mudslide in my County back in 2018 and the County was able to secure FEMA funds to monument the roads that were damaged or destroyed. Of course this is in a small town you some of you may have heard of…Montecito, CA, a whole lot of money resides there, which probably had something to do with getting those funds. The County Surveyor claimed it was the first time FEMA funds were secured specifically for survey work.
It’s occurred to me in the past that, in non-recording states in particular, re-establishing property corners following a large scale, widespread disaster of the kind to recently befall Kentucky, would be incredibly difficult. For the most part all of the records are held by private surveyors who are likely not relying on a wide area HARN NAD83 to reference their coordinates. There just doesn’t appear to be any interest in creating a large scale cadastre of coordinates on a county or region wide basis outside of GIS. Local governments just don’t appreciate the value in creating such a system and private surveyors aren’t that interested in giving away their data. Working for utilities, it puts me in an interesting position from the standpoint that over the years we have amassed survey data over a very wide area, all tied into CORS, but the problem is that the utility isn’t in the surveying and mapping business. It’s simply a support function to assure their resources are properly located. I fear at some point all that data that has been collected over the years will end up in the proverbial dumpster because they don’t have any reason to hang onto it. As time marches on and many of these monuments disappear, replacing them will fall on the lowest bidder and in my experience, they won’t go back where they were. I see it all the time. Road project takes out an original GLO corner and no provision is made to perpetuate it. I have a tie to it but no means of propagating that data and some years later I find another surveyor has proportioned the corner back in, just not where it originally was. Sort of like backing up a hard drive, it’s not an issue until it blows up. Sorry for my ramblings, just something of a pebble in my shoe. Carry on.
WillyIn the August 2022 issue of xyHT magazine, there is an article about the Swedish nationwide Real Time Network. The controlling agency is the “national property agency”. Here is an excerpt from the article…
Note that all property surveys are done by government surveyors.
I have a friend who works in the geodetic department there.
https://bt.e-ditionsbyfry.com/publication/?m=36207&i=753742&p=10&ver=html5
At some point the resistance to properly positioning and documenting property corners in the NSRS begins to look a lot more like protecting surveyors than protecting the public.
Considering how ubiquitous GNSS has become, I don’t see a problem with eventually shifting to a coordinated cadastre. The NGS OPUS shared solutions program offers a glimpse of what a future solution could look like. A verified method for tying observations to the NSRS, complete with positional statistics and metadata to boot.
Especially considering that NATRF2022 is 4D with modelled velocities and epoch date coordinates, the usual arguments against a coordinated cadastre aren’t holding much water these days.
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil Postman
Local governments just don’t appreciate the value in creating such a system
Local governments don’t want the liability of providing this kind of information to the public.
Case in point: Pierce County provided a data base for the entire county, with all the monuments they had coordinates on; local surveyors were using these coordinates to base their surveys. A note on the survey would say something like; position based on published coordinates, corner not visited…
Put the fear into the county, and they pulled the data. It’s back up, but it’s limited.
@john-hamilton makes a good point; but no one knows when disaster will happen, and to what extent. Do put coordinates, tied to property boundaries everywhere? To what extent; every boundary corner? If not, who choose what gets a coordinate?
Points to ponder…
I hope everyone has a great day; I know I will!@dougie I get it. Our State DOT has performed and recorded numerous Record of Surveys on many of their more important ROW corridors, complete with published coordinates on recovered control throughout the projects. Absolute gold to someone like me when a lot of these positions eventually get wiped clean by development, however there is one local surveyor who will record a plat using their data verbatim. Doesn’t even bother showing record vs. measured. It’s really rather annoying to me professionally. When I brought up the subject with one of their head guys, he was like, ‘What can we do? We can’t stop him.’ I don’t believe there is any good cause that can’t be abused in one way or another, so we just do away with good causes? Where does that leave us? I don’t pretend to know the answer and most likely I’ll never run short of rant fodder. The solution possibly could be a requirement for recorded surveys to show an OPUS solution on at least one recovered monument along with a reference bearing in a standard projection. But if there’s no recording requirement, I suppose the point is moot. In poorer, more vulnerable communities where these disasters often take place, I’m sure they have higher priorities.
WillyWhile I agree with you; there’s always that 1 outlier; I was at an LSAW Board meeting and the State Surveyor said something along the lines of: Does anyone still hand draft anymore? And a surveyor from Eastern Washington raised his hand and said; yes, I do. So the idea of submitting cad drawings was shut down.
I did a job for ADA compliance at a gas station in Tacoma; and asked the Architect if I could have his CAD file. He said he doesn’t use cad, he does all his drafting by hand…
I hope everyone has a great day; I know I will!@dougie One foot in the future, one in the past. I guess that what keeps it interesting.
WillyWhile I agree with you; there’s always that 1 outlier; I was at an LSAW Board meeting and the State Surveyor said something along the lines of: Does anyone still hand draft anymore? And a surveyor from Eastern Washington raised his hand and said; yes, I do. So the idea of submitting cad drawings was shut down.
Maybe I’m a jerk, but I think that once technology has been around long enough and is in common usage, that ought to guide standard practice rather than letting one or two individuals hold everything up.
If we’re serious about protecting the public, surely that mentality must extend to utilizing best practices and industry-standard technology.
In the case of CAD, we’re talking what, about 50-60 years of use? Satellite positioning wasn’t too far behind it, either.
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil PostmanIf we’re serious about protecting the public
While I agree with you:
How are we protecting those stuck in the Stone Age? When you say “Public” you can’t cherry pick those that know what they’re doing, and how to do it…
I hope everyone has a great day; I know I will!A co-ordinate cadastre works well on a stable land mass but here in NZ (and elsewhere in world) we are are on the border of two tectonic plates that are moving in the order of 50mm (https://www.linz.govt.nz/data/geodetic-system/datums-projections-and-heights/geodetic-datums/new-zealand-geodetic-datum-2000-nzgd2000/nzgd2000-deformation-model) different to each other.
While the deformation model can model the standard movements, earthquakes are not so predictable (both solid plate movement and localised liquefaction) nor are local landslip events or mining induced effects. In these cases monuments and occupation on boundaries become very important. No model covers every situation perfectly, it’s just is it good enough for your application.
For it to work here we would need a very dense network of CORS to model all the local variances to standard plate movement.
If it could be done would simplify boundary surveying to be just like construction where if you do your job right the result will be correct. With boundary here you can do all your measurements perfectly and still have problems to resolve when the underlying monuments don’t match the record.
With boundary here you can do all your measurements perfectly and still have problems to resolve when the underlying monuments don’t match the record.
Testify brother!
Local movement is going to be an issue whether we’re working with coordinates or monuments. It’s certainly something to take into account, but it’s not everywhere, nor is it insurmountable. I’ve worked on West Coast USA projects from Alaska down to California, and the NGS Horizontal Time-Dependent Positioning tool has proven reliable and repeatable. It does get updated regularly to account for local movement as data are gathered and movements modelled.
Horizontal movement is not as localized as vertical movement at least, so for cadastral work the difficulties are lessened. Around here, reference stations are clustered around the fastest-moving areas of the country.
If we’re talking natural disaster, with a large swath of monuments being wiped off the earth at once, I’d say having coordinates in a well-developed reference frame with modelled velocities and incorporating local movement would be a massive help for reconstructing and remonumenting parcels.
Just like bearings & distances, geodetic coordinates are another piece of information in the jigsaw puzzle of boundaries that may become relevant when physical monuments are unavailable. Whether we use bearings & distances, proportioning, or some other method to compute a point to set, we’re still setting a monument at a coordinate that we have computed.
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil PostmanOK you have coords on a property corner or 4 corners. The earth moves a foot. You do a survey. Where are the corners? At the original coords? Do the corners move with the land? You had a zero offset building on the lot line. Is it now 1 foot over the line or did the line move with the land? When only half of the property moved are the coords valid positions for 2 corners but not the other 2. How would this work?
the coordinates by the nature of how they created, wouldnt move, even if the earth does…. Say for the ECEF model, even if the corners of the lot spun and by some weird coincidence there was one corner that maintained position, and the other three rotated out of the original position, their coordinates would change, as would their position. its the whole idea of coordinates that is beguiling, they seem to be an easy fix to a complex mathematical modeling. throw gravity into the mix and boy howdy then we got tidal changes and woohoo where is the ECEF really at, at that moment in the space time continuum….throw in a big earthquake and now youre really screwed, slowing the orbital procession and everything else. fun times.
@dougie I don’t see why land surveyors or architects who draft by hand should be a barrier to submitting officially required drawings in electronic form. An example of this is the Vermont Land Survey Library. The survey is submitted in PDF format. I’m not a surveyor, but I don’t see anything that requires the surveyor to include state plane coordinates or latitude & longitude on the drawing. So the surveyor who likes to draft by hand just goes down to Staples and has them scan the drawing.
How many posts have been made in this forum where surveyors say the CAD files never leave their office? Whenever another design professional wants an electronic version of a survey, they get a PDF with all the good stuff stripped out. How is that any different than scanning a mylar drawing?
I’m not saying this is a good thing. I’m a notary, although I seldom use the qualification. Our state recently passed a uniform law on land records that allows any notary to take an electronically signed land document (example: deed) with an electronic notarization, print it, and certify it as a true copy. Then it can be recorded in the land records; very handy for towns that are not equipped to accept electronic land records (example: every town and city in Vermont). The down side is that all the security measures incorporated in the electronic signatures just went into the bit bucket.
Log in to reply.