Calamity of a survey

We have encountered similar issues many times per year over the decades.?ÿ It normally comes down to foolish people writing their own deed descriptions without a survey.?ÿ Sometimes it is foolish attorneys, lenders, etc. attempting to save their clients the cost of a survey by writing the description for them.

This eventually leads to a more expensive survey to fix the problems.?ÿ Such as a deed that doesn't close by 50 feet.?ÿ They measured fences and called out north/south/east/west on each length of fence but neglected to say they were following fences that ran off significantly from north/south/east/west and then summed up the directions (assume those that went "west") instead of measuring (east) the closing distance.

I didn't anticipate this would veer off into a drive through liquor store but you never know.?ÿ

At what point do you alert your client that there's a potential issue??ÿ

Before you complete a survey that is almost guaranteed to cause the visitation of the surveyor to be a calamity to the neighborhood.

How much research and field work do you do before you have that conversation (assuming you DO have the conversation)?

All that is required to obtain all the facts.

Is it ever appropriate to "just set the stakes and walk away"?

Walking away may have a wide meaning. To me it means set your marks and not discuss the results with either party with no regard to the consequences should one or the other act on where the marks are. For example, in this scenario building or attempting to build a fence on the driveway. It might be more appropriate to just walk away and not set stakes if both parties can't be reasonable.?ÿ

In this scenario as an example, the historical aerial photos dating back to the conveyance of each parcel 20 years ago may have shown that the trees were planted on a use line between a lawn on the right and a field on the left. That line may or may not hold up in court depending on how the evidence is presented.?ÿ Even though the trees may not meet the time requirement for establishment of a line was there a visible line of use before that? When the land was originally conveyed was the use line visible and was it ever discussed? Did the owners after the original conveyance treat the use line as the boundary by not going past??ÿ These are all questions that need answers to determine a boundary location that have nothing to do with deed measurements. If a surveyor is not allowed or unable to determine the boundary location based on those facts and suggest a remedy that the owners agree to its time to walk. To do otherwise might lead one or the other owner to believe they paid good money to a well thought of company and by god that's my line come hell or high water.?ÿ

@andy-bruner now your story is given me flashbacks from and old grumpy RLS. He would say why didnƒ??t you find or locate this pin or corner. I said we didnƒ??t find it. He said did you look. Yes sir we didnƒ??t get a sounding from locator. He would say did you know where it was supposed to be. Yes sir we computed it off the other found corners and looked again. He said did you DIG. ?ÿNo sir. Go back and dig its not gone dig son dig.?ÿ

He was almost always right. He embraced technology actually but he did not trust it so we always dug.?ÿ

We have frequently intentionally set new boundaries such that they are out away from existing tree lines with horrible old fences.?ÿ That way a new fence can be constructed and the trees can stay on whichever side wants to keep the trees.?ÿ Otherwise, the buyer usually wants to remove the trees and construct a new fence.?ÿ That involves both parties agreeing and normally sharing the expense.?ÿ This way they only share the cost of the new fence.

Sometimes historical views have nothing to do with where the line was chosen to be set.

I'm not licensed (yet), and although I've been working as a technician for 22+ years I don't have a lot of exposure to boundary disputes/discrepancies involving residential properties.?ÿ I'm really interested to read about how you fine folks handle these situations.?ÿ At what point do you alert your client that there's a potential issue??ÿ How much research and field work do you do before you have that conversation (assuming you DO have the conversation)? Is it ever appropriate to "just set the stakes and walk away"??ÿ I can feel this line of thinking spawning more questions as I type this so I'm going to stop now. 🙂

Well, hopefully the person doing the fieldwork would have taken a few shots on the driveway, fence, and tree line in addition to tying whatever monuments were out there so the PLS could see the problem before they create the problem.

Anyway, I'd go to the client and show them what I've found.?ÿ It may be the case that the neighbor has maintained the strip or wedge long enough to have gained title to it, so in that case simply setting the pins and walking away is negligent, imo.

As far as that ever being appropriate... I dunno, maybe if the same person owned both parcels.

?ÿ

My suggestion...

Years ago, I set the corners (in a county in which mine was the only survey business in the county) where the deed directed them to go (ie in the middle of the road...my situation was different and included a building). Coming only months after having the Florida Supreme Court uphold my survey in a Florida landmark case (Seddon v Harpster), I was feeling proud and confident.

Every one in that part of the county quickly became aware of a ƒ??situationƒ?.

An ƒ??outsiderƒ? survey company came in and they set the corners on the old fence line.

Every one in that part of the county quickly became aware of the other surveyors corners and that they differed from mine.

In a few months this went to court. The court ruled possession/acquiescence satisfied the fenceline being the ƒ??boundaryƒ?. I had expected the court to rule this way...it was no surprise. However, prior to the court ruling, my survey was accurate in that I was monumenting the deed, and this was acknowledged by the court.

However, it was very easy for the neighbors to see that my survey was ƒ??wrongƒ?, because they had seen my corners in the road were pulled up as directed by the court. It was only through the help and understanding of an influential neighbor who understood what had happened, and that my survey was not ƒ??wrongƒ?, that I was able to resurrect my reputation. That was over 40 years ago.

Ever since, anytime I encounter a similar situation I withhold setting monumentation until I am directed, by either the court or an attorney, on where to place the corners. I do the research and the field work, then prepare the map showing enough detail to convey to the parties what is going on, then wait for direction to set the corners either ƒ??in the middle of the roadƒ?, or ƒ??in the fencelineƒ?. If you simply go out and set the corners in the fenceline, you are taking it upon yourself (by your actions) to persuade the person who had the road built, that his ownership extends to the fenceline. By doing this you are only inviting and welcoming potential problems which you neither want nor need.

Just from one pic without any supporting info, how can anyone make a call??ÿ Is there an easement, or an agreement??ÿ ?ÿMay be a non-issue.?ÿ Might be huge.?ÿ ?ÿ

By doing this you are only inviting and welcoming potential problems which you neither want nor need.

True, and vice versa. Good experience story too.?ÿ

@olemanriver?ÿ

if you haven't dug a 5 ft hole you're not trying hard enough.... ?????ÿ

It normally comes down to foolish people writing their own deed descriptions without a survey.?ÿ Sometimes it is foolish attorneys, lenders, etc. attempting to save their clients the cost of a survey by writing the description for them.

I deal with this a lot.?ÿ When you find pipes or gun barrels, the distances don't match the deed at all.?ÿ When I don't find any monuments, just work it back to whoever came out first, give them their calls, and work from there.

Y'all have heard of the Dust Bowl from the 1930 time frame.?ÿ Sometimes that blowing dirt would develop into dunes fifteen or more feet above what had been the terrain level prior.?ÿ I've heard of surveyors in Western Kansas getting a backhoe to dig holes deep enough to allow them to search for stones or other known monuments that were documented prior to the creation of the dune.

@jitterboogie so true. I got fired on a job once by my crew chief. And re hired by him same day. Land owner came out and said yall find that corner. ?ÿBy chief said no sir. He said its right there give me a minute I will come show you. He came out with a 25ft tape measred from his brick mailbox and back of curb. ?ÿSaid its right there just deep. My crew chief ran mag locator over nothing. He smiled and told me letƒ??s go. That man looked at me and said son its there. I looked close he had a transit tie clasp. I said you are a surveyor. He smiled and said yes and the client. He owned this huge acreage and turned it into a golf course and subdivision. This corner was an original for primary piece. My crew chief had walked off hollering at me. I went to the truck and grabbed a paint can and marked the spot. Grabbed the deeds and started reeding them aske the surveyor what his name was he told me walked over and said here is what you want to read. I read and ran down told crew chief we needed to look more . He said you been here two weeks your fired. I said ok. Went back to truck grabbed shovel and dug. And dug and dug. At about 3ft down crew chief comes back grabs mag locator shines in hole and she was sounding off. He said keep digging. I got down a few more tenths and there was flagging and the axel. He said your hired and I apologize. He said how did you know the owner was not crazy. I said did you notice his tape was in tenths not inches and his tie clasp was a survey transit. He said nope. He bought my lunch that day. I was promoted to crew chief a couple weeks later. Not just because of that but a few other things proved my worth.

"deed staked" must mean something other than what I'm thinking.?ÿ

Deed Staking is simply taking the clients deed and putting it on the ground.

Boundary Surveying is evaluating the clients deed together with all the adjoiners deeds, the various chains of title (if necessary), the occupation, and the existing monuments, both controlling and not, resolving the inevitable conflicts in accordance with local laws and practices, and only then monumenting the clients actual defensible boundaries. And then documenting the findings, typically with a properly detailed and annotated map.

@olemanriver The deepest I remember digging was 8 ft. The widest 10 x 30. Found stone in both of them.

What makes this story such a chuckle to me is it involved a former employer and their offices. I'd only worked a summer for them before I was even a PC. I'm in the heart of downtown retracing an old 1950's survey that had evolved into some high priced real estate, including the offices of my former employer. Their neighbor was a Walgreens. I'd recovered a couple of old iron pipes that fit the original plat really well and I was out in the parking lot of my former employer where I was looking for the corner that 'should' have been their common corner with them and Walgreens, but the newly constructed fence between them and Walgreens went to another monuments 20' away, throwing a big wang in the line and throwing the line off by several degrees. I'm out in the parking lot with my schonstedt and at least three guys from the office come running out asking what I was doing and I explained I was looking for this corner. Well they promptly hustled me over to the corner the fence went to, that I'd concluded was 20' from where it should be. Told them, 'humor me guys' and staked out for that long lost corner, swung the schonstedt over the spot and she sang like a fat lady. Those guys are grumbling, 'that's not it!', so I dug down a foot and there was a perfect 2" iron pipe, just like the other two I'd found, within .2' of my calc. Those rascals were using 20' of Walgreens property, but since Walgreen built the fence, I let it go. But got to tell you, the whole thing did put a bounce in my step that day. Did they know? Not for me to speculate.

@norm My old boss in Colorado he was also licensed in Nebraska I believe. He told me stories of bringing out excavators to easily start scraping the dirt in spots and going down to find where post had been burned several feet under the ground for section corner and such. I never dug more than a few feet. But i have stabbed prodded scraped larger areas looking. ?ÿI enjoyed moving to colorado from TN and reading the glo notes and the diaries legers of the crews daily logs on a large project i was on. Around c470 e470 i read those every night and onbthe way and as we did fast static looking for corners inbthose townships and ranges. Geezers if i never would have left i would still be surveying out that way. Nothing like finding a stone.

Where I work, there are lakefront lots that have a wide variance of quality of original surveys.?ÿ It is not completely unusual for the platted corners to fall within the edge of a driveway (sometimes known to all parties and sometimes a surprise).?ÿ Sometimes this can be very well confirmed because the original monument is still under some gravel, or even on the other side of the driveway by a good distance, and sometimes it is based on the math of the plat that checks with adjacent monuments.?ÿ I just recently surveyed a lot and had to re-set a corner because the neighbor was running gravel across an angle in the lines (and I had recently surveyed for that neighbor, so they knew what they were doing).?ÿ They knew the gravel was over and were trying to get in contact with their neighbor to do a land swap to make their driveway easier to build, but in the meantime they were just trucking forward.?ÿ Even after I surveyed and marked the corner again, they went ahead and paved over the gravel they had put down.

In those cases and in the driveway in this post, I would determine the location and put something subtle and temporary (i.e. 20d nail) in place just to be able to meet and show it to BOTH parties (either together or individually) to discuss just in case I have missed some piece of evidence that should have been taken into consideration.?ÿ If my determination is going to cause disruption, I can't recall ever having an issue with people when we discussed before I set anything permanent.

If this is the MI case, another thing I would do if I was the later surveyor was contact the earlier surveyor who put the monument in the drive to find out if there was something he/she knew that I missed before monumenting 12 feet over. That would give me the opportunity to see if I missed some evidence and give the other surveyor the opportunity to re-evaluate their determination.

If it were in Michigan,

I feel that Michigan is somewhere near where this survey occurred!

My feelings could be wrong.

Nate

I've dug a hole a little over 5 feet deep but it was for a 60 inch pipe invert and not a monument. ???? Haven't had to go past maybe 18 inches for a monument so far.

We've dug very carefully through 24 to 30 inches of pavement and base too many times to reach monuments that were simply paved over in the 1950-1960 era.