FrancisH, post: 399922, member: 10211 wrote:
So this is were the laziness of US surveyors come into play. Assuming that it's part of a larger subdivision plat, common sense would come into play and say that since the left & right lots have 100' widths then maybe just maybe the middle lot should also have a 100' width. Maybe just maybe you should start to measure other corners west,east of the client's lot and try to find if there is a lot with a 110' width. Because if you found this lot with the 110' width then this would explain where the error started. Your laziness in expanding your survey to find the source of the error on the ground is main cause of your stubbornness. You keep on blaming the previous surveyors but don't realize that you will be part of the 'previous surveyors' who could not correct a blunder in surveying.
You say that finding that 10' error would cause everyone to move 10'? WRONG!!
It would mean that whoever got 110' width would have to pay the guy he got it from. The guy in the middle would get compensation for the missing 10' from the guy with the 110' width. That is the purpose why you survey to find the correct boundary. Sure the guy would want to litigate, it's his right. But I am sure that the court would then say that it's not practical to move everyone 10' to the correct position. Final decision would be to have the aggrieved party be paid by the gaining party. And have all the deeds corrected to reflect their ground position.
If he wants to gain that extra 10' then he could litigate all those lots affected and if he wins then all boundaries would have to move 10'. Whatever his decision is, that is not your concern as a 'professional surveyor'. That's up to the judge. Your job is to find where that missing 10' went.
The point of my diagram was to exaggerate in order to illustrate Mulford's point.
In the U.S. physical boundaries are paramount evidence of location. I understand you don't like that but that's how we do it and for the most part it works surprisingly well. In fact, the worst havoc I have seen is one some Land Surveyor thinks he can outsmart the system and put things where they should be.
In fact, the worst havoc I have seen is one some Land Surveyor thinks he can outsmart the system and put things where they should be.
well I have something to tell you that you may not realize it yet.....The Job Of A Surveyor (Professional?) Is To Put Things WHERE They Should Be.
That's why you have projection systems. That is why the G in GPS stands for GLOBAL. It means every point in the WGS ellipsoid represents 1 single unique point on the ground.
What you see in your GPS screens is it's same location on the ground.
When you locate a point using unique latitude,longitude,ellipsoidal height on the ground, you will find only 1 such point on the ground with the same coordinates.
You won't find another point with the same coordinates 10' away!
FrancisH, post: 399949, member: 10211 wrote: well I have something to tell you that you may not realize it yet.....The Job Of A Surveyor (Professional?) Is To Put Things WHERE They Should Be.
That's why you have projection systems. That is why the G in GPS stands for GLOBAL. It means every point in the WGS ellipsoid represents 1 single unique point of the ground.
What you see in your GPS screens is it's same location on the ground.
Where they already are is often where they should be.
Where they should be based on bare measurements with no other considerations is usually not where they should be.
"When a man has had a training in one of the exact sciences, where every problem within its purview is supposed to be susceptible of accurate solution, he is likely to be not a little impatient when he is told that, under some circumstances, he must recognize inaccuracies, and govern his action by facts which lead him away from the results which theoretically he ought to reach. Observation warrants us in saying that this remark may frequently be made of surveyors." -Thomas McIntyre Cooley
FrancisH, post: 399949, member: 10211 wrote: well I have something to tell you that you may not realize it yet.....The Job Of A Surveyor (Professional?) Is To Put Things WHERE They Should Be.
That's why you have projection systems. That is why the G in GPS stands for GLOBAL. It means every point in the WGS ellipsoid represents 1 single unique point on the ground.
What you see in your GPS screens is it's same location on the ground.
When you locate a point using unique latitude,longitude,ellipsoidal height on the ground, you will find only 1 such point on the ground with the same coordinates.
You won't find another point with the same coordinates 10' away!
Egads FrancisH, please don't tell me that you have failed to account for the velocity of the Sunda tectonic plate by qualifying, "represents 1 single unique point on the ground" at a given standard epoch?!?
I would have surmised that the reputed world's expert measurer would know how to specify the realization and standard epoch date with those unique (WGS84?) coordinates you so expertly discerned.
I'm starting to enjoy this.
You are riding this well!
🙂
Egads FrancisH, please don't tell me that you have failed to account for the velocity of the Sunda tectonic plate by qualifying, "represents 1 single unique point on the ground" at a given standard epoch?!?
Oh great, I also forgot that the Earth also rotates around the sun that also rotates around the galaxy that also rotates around the center of the universe.
How could I have forgotten that fact!!!
Dave Karoly, post: 399946, member: 94 wrote: The point of my diagram was to exaggerate in order to illustrate Mulford's point.
In the U.S. physical boundaries are paramount evidence of location. I understand you don't like that but that's how we do it and for the most part it works surprisingly well. In fact, the worst havoc I have seen is one some Land Surveyor thinks he can outsmart the system and put things where they should be.
No, No, No, Dave. You must begin every survey by making a pilgrimage to the appropriate Initial Point (make sure to reserve a time since everyone else will need to do the same), then simply compute the protracted position of the Section, Township and Range from the Initial Point, conpute the mathematical section subdivision, then compute the unique WGS coordinates of the parcel of interest, load those magic coordinates in your GPS rover, and set the pins whenever the black box beeps at you. EASY PEASY!
My work retracing mineral surveys is even easier for those mineral surveys tied to a U.S. Location Monument 'cause I don't have to recreate the PLSS system. I just have to GPS the USLM and then pin the mineral survey plat to it. Just like the old child's game of pinning the tail on the donkey. Even a blind squirrel with a nasty cold can find the acorns. Oops, I mean set the correct corners to within a centimeter. Of course, I will have to refine the RTK positions with static GPS sessions of two hours or more so I can use OPUS Projects. I wouldn't want anyone to think that RTK is good enough for centimeter-level survey work! 🙂
No, No, No, Dave. You must begin every survey by making a pilgrimage to the appropriate Initial Point (make sure to reserve a time since everyone else will need to do the same), then simply compute the protracted position of the Section, Township and Range from the Initial Point, conpute the mathematical section subdivision, then compute the unique WGS coordinates of the parcel of interest, load those magic coordinates in your GPS rover, and set the pins whenever the black box beeps at you. EASY PEASY!
Funny right? Yet when you think about it, IF every surveyor started to do this for say starting TODAY then every future surveyor who will retrace a lot can have a reliable take off point from the nearest pin corner surveyed in 2016 onwards without having to go back to the initial point. You never thought of that fact right? Sure quite easy to blame everything on the poor surveyor 200 years ago right? Why should you present "Professional Surveyors" think about improving your system right? Why put in the effort to better the system that you work in right? Heck you are not paid enough right?
Why do more work than necessary since your client won't foot the extra bill right? Heck just pass everything to Cooley and his quintessential principle!!!
And what was that that one of you said about your profession? You are there to SERVE the PUBLIC!!!
FrancisH, post: 399961, member: 10211 wrote: Oh great, I also forgot that the Earth also rotates around the sun that also rotates around the galaxy that also rotates around the center of the universe.
How could I have forgotten that fact!!!
FrancisH, now don't get obtuse on me. You took care of those things when you specified that the coordinates are in the WGS reference frame. Since it is 9:00 a.m. Singapore time, I'm surprised that you haven't had a cup or two of Sumatra Mandheling by now.
I worked on one yesterday that was surveyed in the nineties. The back corner was found undisturbed but was out three feet from his math. Fences were built that lined straight at it. I admit it bothers me when the math don't work. I went back out and ran conventional traverse to check it and I hit my points within a tenth. The corner was 5/8 capped rebar undisturbed, the same as all the others I had found. It's the corner and math sometimes will reveal the maths imperfection. Do I move the corner, Heck no. Was the surveyor having a bad day and flubbed his set out? Maybe. Would the farmer whose cattle has been grazing that 3' of ground defend it to his death? Yep.
I worked on one yesterday that was surveyed in the nineties. The back corner was found undisturbed but was out three feet from his math
Now this is what's bothering me with your system. It's surveyed in 1990s, maybe using a theodolite? With a mounted EDM? Steel tape? Yet you have. 3 ft error?
You did not consider this as a blunder? Or that the farrmer or his cow moved the pin?
You can't apply the Cooley defense in this case because errors previously made in 1870s are not applicable in 1990s.
You guys lack common sense.
Actually you are more scared of the farmer and his cow that you wouldn't carry out your professional obligations.
That sums it all up - you are afraid of the neighbor who encroached onto your client's lot!
It's the corner and math sometimes will reveal the maths imperfection.
WOW math is imperfect.....let that thought sink in for a moment.....
Now just hold on a damn minute. I just got home and read this post Fransis posted with a sketch saying the lots were off because noone went looking farther away :
So this is were the laziness of US surveyors come into play. Assuming that it's part of a larger subdivision plat, common sense would come into play and say that since the left & right lots have 100' widths then maybe just maybe the middle lot should also have a 100' width. Maybe just maybe you should start to measure other corners west,east of the client's lot and try to find if there is a lot with a 110' width. Because if you found this lot with the 110' width then this would explain where the error started. Your laziness in expanding your survey to find the source of the error on the ground is main cause of your stubbornness. You keep on blaming the previous surveyors but don't realize that you will be part of the 'previous surveyors' who could not correct a blunder in surveying
You say that finding that 10' error would cause everyone to move 10'? WRONG!!
It would mean that whoever got 110' width would have to pay the guy he got it from. The guy in the middle would get compensation for the missing 10' from the guy with the 110' width. That is the purpose why you survey to find the correct boundary. Sure the guy would want to litigate, it's his right. But I am sure that the court would then say that it's not practical to move everyone 10' to the correct position. Final decision would be to have the aggrieved party be paid by the gaining party. And have all the deeds corrected to reflect their ground position.
If he wants to gain that extra 10' then he could litigate all those lots affected and if he wins then all boundaries would have to move 10'. Whatever his decision is, that is not your concern as a 'professional surveyor'. That's up to the judge. Your job is to find where that missing 10' went.
Alright, how in the hell do you, Francis, think that we survey like you do, and we go and find the 3 corners of the lot that abuts our tract, and call it good? I am not going back to find that post, but I made that post to you several days ago. I pointed out then, US Surveyors do not just look at the monuments of the tract they are surveying, and the 3 monuments of 1 adjoining tract. We also make ties to the block corners, street intersections, or other ties to prove we are in the right spot. If these ties are wrong, then we dig deeper, because then we have reason to believe the monuments we found are not THE ORIGINAL monuments. They don't tie in correctly. So we as surveyors then must begin the task of finding out why they are there. Are they there because Francis came over and dropped a rod in the ground? Did a cheapo ranchito surveyors just measure a 100x 300 foot lot? Are they deer blind ground ties? We as surveyors take not just the one monument in front of us, but we take many monuments, and use them all to form a picture of the lot. Now you are going to argue me that I am surveying the deed, not the monument. I am using the deed as a tool, the plat as a tool, to know where I should find the monument. If I don't find the monument there, I then have to search for it, or do my job in deciding where it needs to be replaced. If I find it in the wrong place, thats when I have to make the decision if it is the original monument and was set where it is on purpose, or in error, and how it needs to be handled. Somewhere it appears that you got the wrong impression that we as surveyors cannot relay that we found the monument to be at a different bearing and distance, and help the landowners make deed corrections accordingly, if needed. We do not grant land, or take land. The land is where it always was, but we can assist in making the deed record show the measurements as taken the day of our survey, and in showing the amount of land owned by each owner. I am in Texas, so my experiences may be a little different 
than some of the surveyors in some of the other states.
I think that I may have figured what has FranceH's panties in a wad...
What he describes as being "professional" surveying in Singapore, sounds a lot like a minimum wage job here in the US. No thinking involved, just push a few buttons, and follow the magic box around setting dimple-ized monuments that don't really mean anything. I wonder if wire flags would be an okay monument in Singapore? No wonder he thinks that we charge too much money for what Professional Surveyors do here in the US.
Life's tough, tougher if you're stupid.
😎
Loyal
FrancisH, post: 399968, member: 10211 wrote: Now this is what's bothering me with your system. It's surveyed in 1990s, maybe using a theodolite? With a mounted EDM? Steel tape? Yet you have. 3 ft error?
You did not consider this as a blunder? Or that the farrmer or his cow moved the pin?
You can't apply the Cooley defense in this case because errors previously made in 1870s are not applicable in 1990s.
You guys lack common sense.
Actually you are more scared of the farmer and his cow that you wouldn't carry out your professional obligations.
That sums it all up - you are afraid of the neighbor who encroached onto your client's lot!
I have attached a Colorado Court of Appeals case where the surveyor's "blunder" is far worse than 3 feet! The court case is Morales v. CAMB, 2007.
Egads, the surveyor blundered setting two lot pins in an 1981 subdivision by the astounding distance of 13 feet. The blunder adversely impacted subsequent land owners that wanted to consolidate 3 lots and build a condo at a Winter Park, CO ski resort. Want to guess how the court ruled?
READ IT, PARTICULARLY THE FIRST FULL PARAGRAPH ON PAGE 5!
When the original surveyor sets a pin in error and it has been relied upon by the land owners as marking the boundary, subsequent surveyors don't get to arbitrarily fix it. The State Board in Colorado does not issue a special "Vice Grips" license to a select few really smart, expert measurers with the authority to pull any offending pins and reset them where they "belong".
You will never understand or comprehend this legal principle, FrancisH! A casual reader of this thread might be prone to substitute your willful ignorance for nitwittery.
If we were to assume the initial point for my local property were to be absolutely perfect in the mind of our Singapore buddy, the following challenges would exist in surveying my local properties. The northeasternmost corner of my land is 157 miles south and 121 miles east of the initial point. Just try to imagine how much error (by Singapore standards) must have occurred in the 1830's to 1860's in finally arriving at said northeasternmost corner. Complicate that with knowing my southwesternmost corner is 20 miles to the southwest of that. The differential error in the initial monumenting of those two corners would be monumental in Sinaporian standards.
So, if I set out to survey my land precisely from the initial point on the Nebraska border I would probably discover that some of it would actually be in a different county from where everybody thinks it is. My home county alone is more than double the total land area of Singapore and it's description is based on an initial point 198. 2 miles away and that initial point is probably not where it's really supposed to be by up to a half mile.
To really screw things up I could acquire an Oklahoma land surveyor license so as to survey the rest of my land. The southwesternmost corner of that is 390 miles southwest of the northeasternmost corner of my local land and based on an entirely different initial point. Wow! Think how badly I could mess up surveying my own ground according to Singaporian standards. Maybe the OK land would move so far that it would actually have water, oil and gas at a shallow depth beneath it instead of nothing but dirt and rock for several thousand miles.
Oh, by the way, Brewster County, Texas is more than 22 times the size of the entirety of Singapore and has a population of about 9000 people.
Oh, by the way, Brewster County, Texas is more than 22 times the size of the entirety of Singapore and has a population of about 9000 people.
So you are now resorting to the 'US is so large it's difficult to survey it accurately' excuse?
Well, Russia is almost 2x larger than US; China and Canada are almost same size as US with same terrain from desert to mountains to prairie. All those countries have a modern cadastral system.
So what's your next line of excuse? You are using the english system so old surveyors maybe had a hard time converting from transits and chains made in France?
I have addressed a few reports concerning this thread -- thanks to those who used the report button to tell me about offensive language, etc. Note that I have not read the entire thread, nor will I. I am relying on you folks to let me know when something bad happens, particularly in this thread.
That said...
However, some seem to be enjoying feeding the troll, so I'm letting it go for now.
HC,
But don't you want an accurate survey of your land? With all those errors propagating over 200 miles you certainly cannot depend on any intermediate corners for control. Only the Initial Point will do. Besides your farm's deed may actually show that you own some prime real estate in downtown Pittsburg. 🙂
I know I'm having some fun playing with FrancisH's illogic, but something very similar happened to mineral surveys when a Congressman from Oregon (who was also a lawyer) became the GLO Commissioner in 1897. Nearly 4000 Colorado mineral surveys were impacted by his buffoonery. He ruled that the long fly tie to a PLSS corner from a mineral survey corner was to be held over the original claim corners when determining which land was patented. Unraveling the falsified returns of the mineral surveyors takes a bit of time to parse out.
I attached two articles written in January 1904 that describes some of the Cadastral mayhem that ensued in Colorado. The Mining Reporter was a weekly mining trade journal published in Denver. The mining men of the West were not pleased with the Honorable Commissioner of the General Land Office Binger Hermann and his amour propre of his decision! Not to mention the, "reductio ad absurdam of the whole business" and the "pettifogging obstruction" of the department.
If you read the two articles, you will see parallels between it and FrancisH's absurd notions of "surveying".
P.S. Yeah, I know I'm all of a sudden posting here. I've become a bit rusty with my writing skills and am preparing the course materials for a workshop I'm giving in February on mineral surveys. I've given various versions of the same talk since 2004, so am trying to add some new material. I didn't know that Singapore surveying would have a place in my course materials until yesterday.
JB Stahl and Dave Doyle are also presenters so I'm sure to have good time with old friends (like I did in 2006 in Pittsburg).
Cheers,
Gene
I have attached a Colorado Court of Appeals case where the surveyor's "blunder" is far worse than 3 feet! The court case is Morales v. CAMB, 2007.
Read the decision and to be honest about it, it reflects on how a stupid US professional surveyor can screw up your already screwed system.
Sorry, this is the reason why this is the perfect example of someone who is too lazy to check on his own work in the field can screw up the client's property.
The decision itself refers to:
"Where land is disposed of by reference to an official plat, the boundary lines [as] shown on the plat control.
It is only when an incompetent surveyor who does not know how to lay out a corner properly that the client is screwed.
I mean this was done in 2007, there is no excuse for a professional surveyor to commit a blunder and not catch it in time. He did not check his monuments because apparently he let his "technicians" do all the work while he was "thinking on the state of Cooley's words" while sitting in his office.
This example actually reflects poorly on the state of competence of US surveyors and not the cadastral system. Because some idiot failed to check on his work, lot owners were aggrieved. Similar to that one idiot PLSS surveyor who messed up the initial PLSS monumenting and now 200 years later, present 'Professional Surveyors' don't know where to start to fix it. Blaming everyone but themselves and hiding behind Cooley's 1870 logic!
