Working in the Utah mountains today. It's not really GPS territory (aspen and pine trees). I'm using a total station and GPS (GPS point pairs to measure into the trees). So a guy comes along and naturally wants to know what I'm doing. So he finds out I'm a surveyor and doing a lot in the area. He says he sure would like to know where all his corners are. So I tell him I can locate them, I'm having good luck and most of the originals are there. Then he proceeds to tell me all he wants is the GPS coordinates of the corners and he can do just fine from there, it works really good on his hand held GPS unit.
So there I am struggling in the trees with GPS, a surveyor with years of experience and real survey equipment. I suppose its all for not, as all this guy needs or wants is the GPS coordinates and he will take it from there.
I'm starting to see that they are never going to pay for the true GPS coordinates. The cost to develop them is just to great. The public is just waiting for them to be online for free. I mean they should be free shouldn't they. Yeah, and most of the free stuff being divvied out by umpteen versions of GIS are various forms of crap. Most of my county's deed records are crap also, some utopian version of a perfect PLSS system. The title people and recorders office have worked for a century to get this thing perfect on paper and it doesn't fit on the ground at all, yet they all totally believe in it. Surveyors are lower than dirt in the eyes of the public and these other folks are heroes. Go figure!
I get a dozen or so calls a year from strangers and past clients that want me to generate GPS data so they can take their handheld out and find their property corners.
To me it is a nightmare in the making. Some of these rookies take every number with the certainty that their monument is supposed to be exactly there with no possibility of being anywhere else when a surveyor provides them.
At some point, this information appears to be something that would come back and bite me in a very costly manner. Because of this, it is dispensed with great caution and with complete understanding that it will only get them in the neighborhood of where they can start looking.
I utilize Google Earth and Delorme and Garmin Maps and Earth Point Topo on a daily basis to explore possible locations for that and more for planning and estimating and then for recon trips.
For some reason many of the recent topographic surveys for use on commercial construction sites, are no longer put on state plane coordinates. This year alone I have seen over a dozen construction projects not on state plane coordinates. When I go to setup GPS for machine guidance system I see this a lot. One project was required to be on SPC, but missed by nearly 1.5 ft. They had been using control provided by local power squad from 25 years ago, and never checked it with current monuments or OPUS. On all the projects I run OPUS and establish SPC so I can monitor my clients base station remotely. Also many of these are either capital improvements or environmental projects that someone is certain to revisit in the future.
Also many of today's construction plans lack BM's and adequate baseline to tie into. Then you have the engineers and architects, rotating and transforming the drawings because they don't know CAD well enough to create a User Coordinate System, and leave the World Coordinates alone.
So I guess this comes back to lack of skilled labor or client not asking for the proper deliverable. Or just plane lazy, as projects are pushed out the door so fast no one cares if it we can build it. They are just looking to get planning board approval.
I've seen plans with the stamp.
"NOT FOR CONSTRUCTION - FOR PLANNING BOARD APPROVAL ONLY"
So what was the intent, to create two sets of plans?
leegreen, post: 328468, member: 2332 wrote: For some reason many of the recent topographic surveys for use on commercial construction sites, are no longer put on state plane coordinates. This year alone I have seen over a dozen construction projects not on state plane coordinates. When I go to setup GPS for machine guidance system I see this a lot. One project was required to be on SPC, but missed by nearly 1.5 ft. They had been using control provided by local power squad from 25 years ago, and never checked it with current monuments or OPUS. On all the projects I run OPUS and establish SPC so I can monitor my clients base station remotely. Also many of these are either capital improvements or environmental projects that someone is certain to revisit in the future.
Also many of today's construction plans lack BM's and adequate baseline to tie into. Then you have the engineers and architects, rotating and transforming the drawings because they don't know CAD well enough to create a User Coordinate System, and leave the World Coordinates alone.
So I guess this comes back to lack of skilled labor or client not asking for the proper deliverable. Or just plane lazy, as projects are pushed out the door so fast no one cares if it we can build it. They are just looking to get planning board approval.
I've seen plans with the stamp.
"NOT FOR CONSTRUCTION - FOR PLANNING BOARD APPROVAL ONLY"So what was the intent, to create two sets of plans?
Yes. Two sets of plans.
leegreen, post: 328468, member: 2332 wrote: For some reason many of the recent topographic surveys for use on commercial construction sites, are no longer put on state plane coordinates. This year alone I have seen over a dozen construction projects not on state plane coordinates. When I go to setup GPS for machine guidance system I see this a lot. One project was required to be on SPC, but missed by nearly 1.5 ft. They had been using control provided by local power squad from 25 years ago, and never checked it with current monuments or OPUS. On all the projects I run OPUS and establish SPC so I can monitor my clients base station remotely. Also many of these are either capital improvements or environmental projects that someone is certain to revisit in the future.
Also many of today's construction plans lack BM's and adequate baseline to tie into. Then you have the engineers and architects, rotating and transforming the drawings because they don't know CAD well enough to create a User Coordinate System, and leave the World Coordinates alone.
So I guess this comes back to lack of skilled labor or client not asking for the proper deliverable. Or just plane lazy, as projects are pushed out the door so fast no one cares if it we can build it. They are just looking to get planning board approval.
I've seen plans with the stamp.
"NOT FOR CONSTRUCTION - FOR PLANNING BOARD APPROVAL ONLY"So what was the intent, to create two sets of plans?
I work for an engineering firm and it is always the case that there is a set of approval plans, permit plans, bid plans, followed by the almighty "issued for construction plans". Can't speak to the shoddy coordinate work, but it is very typical to have more than one not for construction set for a design.
LRDay, post: 328462, member: 571 wrote: I'm starting to see that they are never going to pay for the true GPS coordinates. The cost to develop them is just to great. The public is just waiting for them to be online for free. I mean they should be free shouldn't they. Yeah, and most of the free stuff being divvied out by umpteen versions of GIS are various forms of crap. Most of my county's deed records are crap also, some utopian version of a perfect PLSS system. The title people and recorders office have worked for a century to get this thing perfect on paper and it doesn't fit on the ground at all, yet they all totally believe in it. Surveyors are lower than dirt in the eyes of the public and these other folks are heroes. Go figure!
The dirty little secret is that the title people and the recorders office are far from having it perfect on paper. The United States for the most part has never had a true land registration system that says who owns what. There is no federal, state, county or municipal agency that can guarantee that you own what you think you own. We have in the past and continue to do so, land tenure on the cheap and just paper over the problems with title insurance to give the appearance of security. Unfortunately, the boundary surveying based on said system has been historically done on the cheap as well.
Paul D, post: 328503, member: 323 wrote: I work for an engineering firm and it is always the case that there is a set of approval plans, permit plans, bid plans, followed by the almighty "issued for construction plans". Can't speak to the shoddy coordinate work, but it is very typical to have more than one not for construction set for a design.
I'm working on a project now that has 5 sets!!
Paul D, post: 328503, member: 323 wrote: I work for an engineering firm and it is always the case that there is a set of approval plans, permit plans, bid plans, followed by the almighty "issued for construction plans". Can't speak to the shoddy coordinate work, but it is very typical to have more than one not for construction set for a design.
One of the principals at my former company had a story about when he worked in the field that he had staked out a major land development with nothing but "not for construction" plans. I guess that was all he was provided by whoever he was working for at the time.
I was party chief for laying out a $585,000,000 silicone plant, the plans were Fed-ex'd overnight to us (almost every day) for layout within the next two days there were only a few screw ups over 2.5 years of this. One of ours caught by the construction foreman before setting forms, $50 attaboy, one by us, that cost $3,500 in new concrete, and one by the builder, that cost them $350,000:-O. I learned a lot of lessons, one of the most important document EVERYTHING.
LRDay, post: 328462, member: 571 wrote: Working in the Utah mountains today. It's not really GPS territory (aspen and pine trees). I'm using a total station and GPS (GPS point pairs to measure into the trees). So a guy comes along and naturally wants to know what I'm doing. So he finds out I'm a surveyor and doing a lot in the area. He says he sure would like to know where all his corners are. So I tell him I can locate them, I'm having good luck and most of the originals are there. Then he proceeds to tell me all he wants is the GPS coordinates of the corners and he can do just fine from there, it works really good on his hand held GPS unit.
So there I am struggling in the trees with GPS, a surveyor with years of experience and real survey equipment. I suppose its all for not, as all this guy needs or wants is the GPS coordinates and he will take it from there.
I'm starting to see that they are never going to pay for the true GPS coordinates. The cost to develop them is just to great. The public is just waiting for them to be online for free. I mean they should be free shouldn't they. Yeah, and most of the free stuff being divvied out by umpteen versions of GIS are various forms of crap. Most of my county's deed records are crap also, some utopian version of a perfect PLSS system. The title people and recorders office have worked for a century to get this thing perfect on paper and it doesn't fit on the ground at all, yet they all totally believe in it. Surveyors are lower than dirt in the eyes of the public and these other folks are heroes. Go figure!
Sure thing Farmer/Realtor/Yuppie (whatever) Brown...
USGS Bench Mark
REF FRAME: IGS08 (EPOCH:2014.6215)
X: -1874970.543(m) Y: -4511846.913(m) Z: 4088956.381(m)
THAT IS A "GPS Coordinate."
:whistle:
Loyal
Loyal, post: 328572, member: 228 wrote: Sure thing Farmer/Realtor/Yuppie (whatever) Brown...
USGS Bench Mark
REF FRAME: IGS08 (EPOCH:2014.6215)
X: -1874970.543(m) Y: -4511846.913(m) Z: 4088956.381(m)THAT IS A "GPS Coordinate."
:whistle:
Loyal
Yeah, that would make them wonder. The sad thing is they can get coordinates from various sources Some "coordinates" are better than others and many are all but free. So most of the general public doesn't put much, if any, value on what we do (they won't pay). The county says they don't give out coordinates when I ask but I know they do. On this project the plat is a PLSS breakdown all the way to some 5 acres. They are complaining that the plat is no good because it doesn't have the distances along the boundaries. I can figure it out just fine. What scares me now is I told the county what the deal was. Probably not to long from now the 330's, 660's and 1320's will show up in the recorders plat, they will calc some coordinates based upon that and the general public will apply them with their handheld GPS units (or phones). The original marks will be ignored! Then when a surveyor does do the job it will be all wrong BECAUSE it's not N, E, S, or W and 10 the 30 feet off. Just another surveyor that can't match anything or read and apply a deed in the public's mind!
I see no problem for the Land Surveyors in this sort of situation. Just make sure your suit still fits, you have a clean dress shirt & tie, and update your Expert Witness fee schedule. There will always be fools and penny-pinchers; the Courts will need guidance from qualified professionals as to the "true" evidence found. Just exercise "CYA" in your own work, and wait for the lawyers to call. Remember to charge by the hour.
