Fellow from Houston calls on Wednesday afternoon. His company will be burying some phone line for AT&T in a small Kansas town, population under 10,000. Says he needs some easement limits located. Adds that everything must be marked before they started working on Friday.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Based on the current list of commitments, this guy might get a promise date around Thursday, June 18.
Granted, I am the closest licensed surveyor actively working in that community and was recommended to him by city personnel. Nearest other crews are around 45 miles out. Most likely firms to have a spare crew (but who can't find this town on a map) are more like 100 miles out.
You can laugh now but cry later.
It sounds like a rudimentary RTK job or robotic for construction purposes.
Someone will ride into town on their steed and knock it out.
Local will say who was that Masked Man as they hear "hi yo Silver" off in the distance. (Tonyo is back at the office supplying coordinate info)
If you think that there aren't capable RTK or robotic practitioners that can do this, then you have to deal with biases that you may have developed to survey field practices. There is no such thing as conventional surveying anymore.
The catch is that they must first locate the blocks and streets from which these easements derive their descriptions. That involves research that can only be performed by digging through the local files that are not internet accessible. That takes time, whether your office is across the street or 600 miles distant. Expecting me to drop 18 clients, many of whom are semi-regulars, to accomplish tomorrow something for an LLC that will never send any business my way in the future is not going to happen. The equipment used is somewhat irrelevant.
Also, based on previous comments from similar firms, $200 to $300 would be a premium charge for any services needed. Better keep it under that.
Is it just a Texas type of thing (have some fun)
Tell them you've already been retained by an attorney representing a concerned group of property owners adjacent to the project....actually working for the contractor would surely be a conflict of interest.
........sooo have a nice day! 🙂
In rural Texas, the contractors usually mark the limit lines themselves.
The utilities are in put into a shambles every time something new goes in as they run over each others distribution lines.
They've probably known all winter their schedule and finding themselves out of their element at the last moment they have punted.
Along highways they have plenty of room. Rural roads are another mess with telephone, water and county road maintenance constantly destroying each others works.
Keep laughing until they hear it in Houston...
> Also, based on previous comments from similar firms, $200 to $300 would be a premium charge for any services needed. Better keep it under that.
That doesn't compute for the scope of work required that I visualize.
You really haven't stated the scope clearly so that is unknown.
This is not a specifically Tx thang at all and it is not contemporary situation. Always has and will be. Always has been a vent here.
I do know that projects like you state are constantly in progress here. Most use existing ROWs or known easements/servitudes. All have the support of local governmental agencies and they do abet the project.
I can tell you about the ALTA type surveys that I did while a member of a 3 person crew in the 80s for a major fast food chain. Before Internet and instant communications, crew would roll to a site(sometimes as much of a 5 hour drive) and complete the job in 2-3 days. We did scores if these for the client. They paid top $for it,of course. A lot of leg work and attention to detail necessary when you arrived at site plus a lot of tricks learned from experience and thinking outside of the box.
A major factor in this particular city is that there over 150 tiny additions that combine to form this city of under 10,000 population. Each addition creator had their own vision of lot widths, lot lengths, alley widths (if any), street widths and need to monument any corners. Very few additions are less than 80 years in existence. Most date to the late 1800's. Some would leave a 30-foot strip along one side to be used as half of a future street. Then the next addition creator might place a 20-foot or 40-foot half street adjacent to that a year later or 30 years later. Some blocks have an alley up the center. Others have two alleys creating four areas of lots. A few have "T" alleys. One little addition has adjacent lots with widths that vary widely, e.g., 90',30',30',50',80',20'. Who knows why?! There are a few pockets of metes and bounds tracts, including two along Main Street, that predate the adjoining additions. Going north on Grant Street is consistent until you hit Beech Street, then you must jump about 30 feet to the west along Beech in order to continue north on Grant.
In this specific case, the need to install a new line from one point to a point nominally 20 blocks distant could easily require knowledge of a dozen different little additions with their individual quirks. Not all that different from grasping how to work in downtown Austin or East Austin, except that there are 150 years of survey plats available to study, created by a couple dozen primary sources.
one solution, maybe
I did a similar job for a "quickie" federally funded sanitary sewer job back in the eighties. It was a smaller hamlet in SW Oklahoma with a population of about 2500. The BIA was also involved. The plats were horrible, and near as we could determine, weren't followed very well. We found sixty and seventy year old houses in the R/W and on the wrong lots entirely.
The federal funding also hinged on the municipality already having procured R/W. The decision was made to place the sanitary sewers in predictable and convenient locations and then prepare a metes and bounds description for the entire run. Each property owner then dedicated R/W for "any and all of the described easement" that touched or crossed their property.
Kind of a dirty way to do it...but it worked.
one solution, maybe
Sounds like surveying in the small town in NW Oklahoma where I went to HS.
Went to set a block corner one day and it was in the middle of an existing building. The good thing was it wasn't a permanent building.
There is more than one garage partially built in the street there and several houses with the front porch in the street and the house on the lots. It can get interesting.
SJ
B-)
one solution, maybe
> Sounds like surveying in the small town in NW Oklahoma where I went to HS.
Lone Wolf, Roosevelt and Snyder is where I was talking about.
I didn't know there were any high schools in NW Oklahoma! 😉
My father's family hails from Alva, Ok. Wherebouts you talking about?
one solution, maybe
NW Corner of Dewey County.
One of my Great Grandfathers, his wife, mother and part of an eventual 15 offspring settled there in about 1900.
B-)
These are existing easements
Most likely block line/street line throughout the entire stretch put possibly with some alley location required. The survey issue must be built into their contract with AT&T as I received a similar call from a different company about one month ago. That job involved about six blocks in a town before marking existing State highway R-O-W limits for another six miles followed by roughly a half mile of county road R-O-W. Staying within the right-of-ways would be a piece of cake. Proving it calls for a licensed land surveyor. That company was calling in late March about a project to start in June.