Lahaina corners

Well written article. Good thing the local surveyors are trying to get out in front of the issue before the bulldozers start tearing everything up.

It's (sadly) ironic that the Lahaina fires occurred literally days before this article was published:

https://amerisurv.com/2023/08/12/monuments-going-up-in-smoke/

I'll just put my flame-retardant suit on (pun intended) and say it: increasing likelihood of these catastrophic events are a good argument for a coordinated cadastral system, which can be used in addition to (not replacing) the pre- and post-disaster efforts outlined by the articles.

I'll go out on a limb and say there's probably some local surveyors that already have a bunch of the property coordinates in some usable fashion. If it's anything like our city database much of it can be reset within a tenth.

But maybe not, the little I've seen on the big island are rebars at lot corners and nails at the PC/PTs in the centerline of paved roads. Sometimes nails projected onto the centerline along lot lines. I think Maui is similar from what I remember. But it will take lots of hard work to replace those property lines on the ground.

these catastrophic events are a good argument for a coordinated cadastral system

I've been saying the same thing for a long time; what's going to happen when Mount Rainier blows up and dumps 50' of hot mud in the Puyallup Valley?

@RADAR be runnin'! 😱

I note that in these pictures of fire ravaged suburban areas the roads are largely intact. Monumenting the centerlines of subdivision roads would mitigate this monument loss problem.

That won't help much; when the streets are under 50' of hot mud...

https://www.xyht.com/professional-surveyor-archives/rules-of-the-game-coordinates-as-boundary-evidence/

Excellent topic for discussion. Major tornados create their own form of large-scale rip in the cadastre.

Good argument but who is going to pay the build the system and reporting/logging follow ups to keep the data base? How is anybody going to know if reported coordinates are junk, based on junk observations? It surely is something to ponder though.

I will be directly involved in the Lahaina retracement survey. It will not be easy as it was a mess, in terms of overlaps and gaps, before the fire happened.

You don't need a complicated system. Just require that two monuments on every boundary survey be labeled with State Plane coordinates and have the appropriate metadata somewhere on the plat or in the report.

This will be a burden on some PLSs but it may also be the kick in the butt they need to either retire or push themselves to provide a more professional service.

Hopefully the surveying community can be helpful here. It's such a sad tragic area now, it's going to be very difficult to work there. I salute everyone involved in the work ahead.

It doesn't take a big disaster to mess up a neighborhood.

A cable/internet company put underground fiber lines in our neighborhood to compete with the other big company this summer. In a 10 minute walk can point to a half dozen places that I suspect they disturbed or removed lot corner rebars. This is a recent enough neighborhood that perhaps the math or proportioning will get close to the original locations.

Across town, the city rebuilt the crumbling street in front of the church. I can point to a quarter section corner and 3 lot corners that absolutely must have been destroyed. This is a neighborhood where the plat has foot-level misclosures, curve "data" cannot be fitted into the rest of the plat even that closely, and a 10-foot mistake, all before you even think about how accurately the original monumentation matched the plat.

@bill93

This is an excellent point...I've worked on quite a few projects where municipalities, utilities, and/or contractors blew out enough primary centerline monumentation (official city/county monuments in cases) to wipe out the original basis for entire blocks of older subdivisions (high-end homes). Minimal lot corners monumented, rarely consistent with each other because the surveyors really only cared enough to look at adjacent lots.

If a catastrophic event rolled through in an area like this, not only would the rest of the local mons likely get wiped (or at least disturbed to the point of being useless), but perhaps the section corners that they were originally established from. (If they were still there in the first place.)

In these cases, even if these project managers had gone through the official monument removal/destruction/documentation process, it would do no good - any local reference points that could be used to re-establish those primary monuments would be wiped out as well.

Sometimes it is more insidious. Downtown Portland has been getting redeveloped a quarter block at a time. Every time a new building goes up, and the associated sidewalk and curb gets rebuilt, a few more monuments get trucked off. There is a state law that says that any destroyed monuments must be replaced, but that is rarely enforced or obeyed. If the monuments get replaced at all it happens when the place is refinanced and someone checks item 1 of Table A.

Yes, this was a big issue in Joplin. The Missouri Professional Society had an article writtenn up about the "group" effort of numerous surveyors helping out.

https://www.xyht.com/surveying/wildfires-a-case-for-coordinates/

My experience with wildfires in the big country is that they expose monuments. In fact they can make recovery way easier. Until of course equipment comes in and starts destroying. In urban areas it's probably a bad thing for monument recovery because of the machinery sent out to deal with debris.

I remember Ridgeline, from Utah, talking about the aftermath of forest fires: they would hook a heavy duty chain between two tractors and drag it through the burn, knocking down the burnt stumps, and everything else, for that matter.

Moe is right; this would be way different in an urban environment...