Anyone have a crazy/wacky/horror land survey story they'd like to share? Example: A homeowner buys a house without a survey, only to discover a big 'gotcha' down the road..
Would love to read : )
Randy Rain, post: 346519, member: 35 wrote: One off my favorites of recent vintage...
oh my.. great one - thank you!
There was a local "big boy" consulting firm that a few years ago had prepared an "ALTA" survey of a specific site with Interstate frontage. Their ALTA did not include any vertical info and an out-of-state a&e firm hired us to "topo" the site for a large chain retail outlet. All went well until I tried to correlate an old sewer atlas I had for the area. According to what I had, there should be a MH dead center in the lot; there wasn't. It did not show on newer atlases and the ALTA showed what the 'newer' atlas showed; the sewer running at the rear of the property. I dug through the courthouse and found the easement, which was not included on the ALTA, and it reflected what the old atlas showed.
I popped the lids on the MHs up and downstream and, by-golly, the 18" outfall DEFINITELY ran on a diagonal. We measured off where the MH should be and could not get a signal with the Schonstedt. We spent probably two hours digging and finally heard a faint, but definitive signal. An hour more and the MH wound up several feet deep with a skinny little 1950 flange and cover that sounded more like a tin can than a cover to the pin-finder. Closer inspection revealed an 18" outfall line running 3/4 full.
I showed it on the survey and sure enough the a&e firm called and initially wanted me to REMOVE the MH from my drawing (wtf?). They had contacted the large firm that prepared the ALTA and was told it definitely DID NOT exist....(OK, man, whatever!). I wouldn't take it off the drawing and found out a few days later someone had convinced them the MH might exist, but was probably abandoned. Apparently they plowed ahead with design.
Six months later a contract was let on the site and the grading contractor contacted me to give him some grade stakes. I showed him the MH. He showed the City inspector the MH. Eventually, somehow, someone was able to convince the a&e firm and the owners the MH actually existed.
I get a call a few days later from an engineer that had just landed at the AP and wanted to know if I was available to meet him on the site. I did. He was pissed as hell that none of his staff had even paid attention to what my drawing showed. He left me with the impression a tech had actually removed it from their base drawing. The only way he found it was an original hard-copy print I had initially sent them that laid dormant in the job file.
After it was all said and done, the original seller and the big boy survey firm split the cost to relocate 350' of 18" sanitary sewer. They didn't do it willingly.
I came out smelling like a rose and had my lunch bought by an engineer from St. Joseph, Mo.
That's a good one.
paden cash, post: 346529, member: 20 wrote: .... sure enough the a&e firm called and initially wanted me to REMOVE the MH from my drawing (wtf?).
There you go, remove it from your drawing and it will no longer exist.
That's hilarious. You just (would have) saved them a lot of time and money right there. They should have been buying you beers and taking care of it on their design immediately. I can't believe the lunacy sometimes in big outfits.
Good story.
Tom Adams, post: 346540, member: 7285 wrote: There you go, remove it from your drawing and it will no longer exist.
Here's the skinny on what happened.
The St. Joseph, MO outfit had actually already started their "design" working off of the original ALTA. When contacted for terrain info, the big-boy firm here had not utilized a good bench for their survey (which is weird because the rear of the property was originally in a flood plain) and could not provide the additional info in a timely manner...so they called me.
Apparently the only part of my delivered CAD file that was utilized was the point grid and contour data. Thank God I sent them a hard copy. I believe that was back in the days when I use to delivery XML files (or TIN data) with my stuff. I'm guessing they either exported just my contours into their base drawing or froze the levels (layers). I did tell the engineer I had a pretty good paper trail of all my correspondence but he was just interested in getting the egg off his face.
I'm sure the request to "remove" it from my drawing was from an inexperienced tech that was just "rolling with flow" that inadvertently occurs on projects that have many fingers in the pudding.
I got 'nuthern....
When I was doing highway work we did the whole work-up on US59 from West Siloam Springs south to a town named Watts, OK. In some placed you could stand on the highway and pee in Arkansas. (Watts, by the way, was most assuredly used as the inspiration for the series "Justified". The local law and city council all got thrown in the pokey for dealing meth.) Being hill country the section lines meant little to the travelling public. Section corner locations were always in some really strange locations.
I had some older SD11 corner refs and we wound our way through a "Mulligan Flats" rural neighborhood looking for an old brass cap at this particular location. Knowing the 'cottage industry' habits, agricultural interests and general mistrust of ANYBODY tied to the government, we treaded lightly. This one (poorly prepared in 1958) corner reference noted a fairly short distance from a "porch post"...
I pulled up in front of this "well used" frame house and started looking around for any indication that previous surveyors may be resting in shallow graves...there was a young boy on the porch (he had left his banjo indoors). The first words put of his mouth were "lookin' for survey mark?"
A little surprised he was spot on, I said yes. He immediately holler for his "pa".
I don't know what it is about long straggly hair and ZZ Top style beards, but they all make the person look like he's mad at you. "Pa's" intense stare was intimidating as he opened the screen door. I was halfway into my "sorrytobotheryousirbutIthinktheremaybeasurveypointinyouryard..." routine when he told me to hold on...and disappeared back into the house.
I imagined he was loading a sawed-off shotgun. I was hoping they were Christian so there might be less chances of me winding up in a batch of chili.
In a moment he appeared from the backyard with some jumper cables in his hands. He started up a truck and whipped it around in front of another hunk of iron that was sitting there...with a couple of flats.
In a few seconds he had started up the second hunk-o-junk and backed it up about twenty feet. He shut off the engine and walked back to where the truck had been sitting and kicked the dirt. He looked at me and smiled, "here 'tis!"
Sure enough the brass cap had been protected by one of the junk cars in his yard and he knew right where it was! A fairly nice fellow really.
Apparently not an isolated problem in Florida.
http://www.news4jax.com/news/survey-dispute-leaves-family-fighting-for-their-home/33762154
A county away from me, in the nearest actual city, a local engineering company was working on very pricey subdivisions in the late 70s and still is today for that matter.
One of the owners, an :-$ engineer, built a new house within view of the racket club and lake.
About 16mos later he was notified by his neighbor that half his house was on the neighbor's property.
That cost him about as much again as he already had invested to get the neighbor satisfied.
Had a guy buy a lot in the city at a tax sale. On the tax map it showed 3 of the 4 blocks in this subdivision were vacated becauyse of an overlap with a prior sub; all but this block. His 25 foot lot turned out to be 1-1/2 feet wide. Guess that why it went for taxes.
Many years ago I was hired to verify the location of a house being built next door to the clients vacant property.
It was within a new subdivision and all the curbs and gutters were in. The lots were all graded, too, but this block was entirely flat.
Sure enough, the house foundation was fifteen feet over the lot line.
When I asked the owner why he didn't get a survey, he said he paid the contractor $500 to get one.
When I asked the contractor who did the survey he hemmed and hawed and finally admitted he did it himself!
What he had done was measure westerly from the curb face instead of the centerline of the street to the east.
He had to tear out the foundation footings and all the rough plumbing and redo them.
I asked what that cost and was told $2,000 or so.
But he got to keep the $500!
(And I'll bet he never built another house without a survey.)
Don't be too sure of that Dave.
I know of a cheap *** contractor who was so cheap he decided to locate the lot corners himself to save a few bucks, and built a house on the wrong lot. Not once, not twice, but three times.
The same contractor also had to show up in court one day with his checkbook because he somehow obtained a set of plans of a house that was designed by a certain architect for someone else. He mirrored the plans and built another house with them.
Reminds me of this Simpsons episode...
[MEDIA=youtube]5pxG4yd8U3U[/MEDIA]
Years ago, I was locating some monuments for a right of way project. We took a break at lunch and parked in a church parking lot. Hippy rodman walked behind the church to pop a leak. He came wondering back with someone's stash box (nice little wooden box, screwed shut). Shaking my head, somehow he convinced me that he was going to open it with a screwdriver. Inside was a large baggy of white powder, but it contained small "chunks".
Looked up at the name of the church- "St. Francis of Assisi". Turns out it was a cremated dog, in a memorial box, that had been placed at the base of a large tree along a walking path, behind a church based on the patron saint of animals.
We laughed, we cried, and returned the remains.
"Hippy John" was a life-long professional rodman that worked for a friend of mine for years. A rather disheveled fellow, he was good help. But he looked like a wino. Once they were doing some recon for a new Interstate relocation in a rather "urban" area. Hippy John had wandered into a low traffic intersection in the warehouse district to look for any centerline control. He wandered around in a slow circle with his lanky gate and heavy boots. The whole time staring at the asphalt like a turkey circling a beetle; cocking his head back and forth....AND shaking a paint can in his hand.
This was too much for the local patrol car that was sitting in the shadows. They had a "paint head" for sure...
When they pulled up to the intersection and briefly hit the siren, John stepped aside and snapped a salute posture to wave them past. Trouble was they weren't going through the intersection....they wanted him!
After a few tense minutes the PC and John convinced them there was a real reason he was out there and wasn't just another paint head wandering around in a circle.
****************
About ten years ago I had a crew out crawling through back yards for a sewer relocation topo. This one crew was NEVER going to make the GQ best dressed list....
I had armed them with business cards and a printed sheet that explained what we were doing and a contact number at the Public Works Dept. Sure enough, my phone rings. It's a little old lady that had spoken with them and gave permission to go in the back yard, but she was just calling to make sure everything was copasetic. I asked her, "Do they look like a bunch of pirates?" She slowly replied, "Well, yes."
I told her that's the right guys...she was satisfied after that to let the "pirates" in the back yard. :pinch:
That's a whole different nest of snakes. Those subdivisions in St Augustine are extremely old protracted plats with little or no angular information and in most cases not well monumented, if at all. They are very sparsely developed (just the occasional lot here and there). So basically you end up running up several blocks just to place a single lot so as to try to be in harmony with as much of the occupation as possible. It's a real mess out there. Quite a bit of this area is county owned land that is being developed under a program similar to habitat for humanity and our firm has been contracted to survey for this program. Most of these plats were recorded in around 1917, the two that we have done the most work in are the "Afro-American subdivision of the Dancy Tract" and the "Afro-american subdivision of the Avice and Veil Grant Dancy Tract" but College Park is every bit as messed up.
During the Boundary Survey of what is now Palm Coast I had to research the Spanish Land Grants (vague at best) in St. Johns County. Retracement in the field was a horror!
When I was a very young rodman I was working on my first survey crew, a father and son outfit. We were working on a site that would soon become a subdivision in a neighboring county to St. Louis. We were well off the beaten path and had just returned to the truck for our end of the day lunch. As we were all about to hop into the chariot for the trip back to civilization, a Mercedes SUV come blazing up the trail and stops in front of the out truck. Out hops a very stocky man in his 60Ûªs. We all exit the truck promptly to see what is going on.
We soon find out that the older man driving the Mercedes is the adjoining property owner to the guy selling out. He explains to the crew chief, in his very think German accent, that we are never to return to this area again. In fact, if we do he will most definitely shoot at us! The Crew Chief was a very salt of the earth fellow that spent many tours in Vietnam and he didnÛªt take this threat too well. As soon as the German fellow stopped ranting there was a long pause. I looked at the IM ÛÒ who was the CCÛªs son. He simply told me, ÛÏGet back in the truck, PopÛªs Û÷bout to blowÛ.
The crew chief turned and took a step back as if he was about to get into the truck. Then quickly turned around and yelled. ÛÏYou want to shoot! Shoot at me! Well be ready Û÷cause IÛªm gonna shoot back! I have shot and killed many a FÛªing ***** while crawling through holes in Û÷Nam and I got no problem putting one through a Nazi Skull! In fact, (he paused) I have my pistol right here in the truckÛ?Û He turned back towards the truck.
And no sooner than when he turned around the German fellow high tailed out ÛÒ in reverse - not even bothering to turn around.
IM turned to me and said, ÛÏTold yaÛ. It was a quite ride home. I bought the Crew Chief lunch the next day and asked him if he ready had a gun in the truck. He said no, it was in his coat.
Who paid for your survey?
...it was in his coat.
