In 2004 a local surveyor was breaking down a section out in the desert. The section to the east had been surveyed in 1994 and the common 1/4 corner had not been found so the 1/4 was proportioned in by the 1994 surveyor. The 2004 surveyor found the original 1877 1/4 corner a little over 100’ south of the 1994 surveyor’s corner. It’s the original, undisturbed stone with a chiseled 1/4… rock solid.
2004 surveyor notifies all the neighbors and the 1994 surveyor. All parties understand that the 2004 surveyor’s find is the true corner. This 10 year mess is about to be cleaned up in short order and then…
A BLM resource technician shows up on the scene with a hand-held GPS loaded with GCDB* coordinates. (NOTE – NOT A BLM SURVEYOR – a resource person of some sort, maybe a college student working in range management or GIS road mapping, I dunno, but NOT A FEDERAL SURVEYOR). BLM Resource Tech tells the owners that neither the 1877 stone or even the 1994 pipe are correct. Says “Coordinates from the hand-held put the corner way over here by my BLM jeep”. He then went on his merry way, presumably to go kick a hornets nest in an outhouse.
To make a long story short, the owners were finally calmed down and the BLM Resource Manager (a really good, top-flight guy) educated the Resource Tech, and the dust settled.
Lessons learned from this story? All the PLS’s involved first wanted to bring the state board of registration in to go medieval on the Resource Tech’s derriere, but I’m glad we didn’t. The state board is busy enough trying to keep up with the unlicensed buffoons making a living bilking people by performing “mapping services”, “foundation location reports” and “fence line locating”. This was just a one-time dumb mistake by an ignorant kid with a new toy and a vague idea of what the coordinates in the toy represented. Hopefully the BLM resource managers are now a lot more savvy to educating their staff when they issue them a Garmin loaded with GIS coordinates. We surveyors should make more of an effort to educate other laypeople who may use recreational grade GPS units (realtors, utility companies, geocachers, gov’t road, sewer and water departments come to mind) about the limitations of hand-held GPS units and the need to have licensed land surveyors determine property boundaries. I always tell them that the hand-held’s accuracy is just close enough to get a cruise missile to its target.
Seems like that entire mess could have been avoided had the 1994 surveyor looked a bit harder.
This is an example of something most all surveyors deal with. The practice of unlicensed helpers talking to the public as if they know what they're talking about.
We have a new regulation that all city road re-construction and new construction projects will submit azbuilts after construction. At the new office site we did that. Two years later this kid carrying a hand held unit shows up and is locating utility boxes outside the office. I go up to him and ask what's going on? "I'm locating all the utilities with GPS so the city and put them on our GIS".
REALLY? They even did a write up in the paper about him.
Same thing with all the other construction projects we did. I think they all got overridden.
Tommy, I kind of imagine that’s what happened. BLM range technician stops to talk to rancher who is tells him “the dandest thing happened, one surveyor plopped a pipe in the ground that he said was the corner and then another surveyor finds an old rock and says the rock is the corner” and the range kid says “Pipes and Rocks? Ha! Silly surveyors. I got the real location right here in this GPS unit”. The kid was trying to be helpfull and was way out of line.
