WAs wondering if anyone had any insights on surveying here. Last time I was here, I was a lowly instrument man, on the west end, we were doing elevation certs, running level loops from Mag nails a 1/2 mile from the sight, up and through the house.
Tomorrow I start one of 2 jobs up here on the East end. North side of the island, waterfront site , and then south side another waterfront site but this time in a city.
1st site borders a County park. So not sure if that will be monumented or not.
Just wondering if there are specific things to look out for. Like Mags in centerline, non ferrous concrete markers etc. I can't imagine its old enough to use trees and blazes for corners, but my research pack is rather light.
TIA
SOOO.... I figured it out on my own anyway.
I come from Jersey and things are just different here. We have wide open roads, on ramps long enough to get you up to 70 even with an old beater or work truck, and corner pins are ferrous and everywhere.
Rarely, and usually only in the pine barrens, do I see things like Ditch lines, Axles and the like as corners. Although in CapeMay County I did see a marble stone emblazoned with the property owners Initial. That was strange.
East end of Long Island, has non ferrous Concrete Monuments. Other than that I think I found one or two rebars or caps. The rest was stones, copper pipe, what could be best described as a Guy-tie, and a stone wall. (Which the last thing I have never actually seen surveying, being from South Jersey)
And apparently Seawalls at end of life are resold to be seawalls form ocean front resorts. I found 2 USCG Monuments embedded in seawalls running perpendicular to the shore line. That were not listed in that area.
Too be fair, calling them seawalls... they were more like 4' wide trapezoidal Jersey barriers. Linked together with iron couples. Why they had monuments in them to begin with is beyond me, the fact they were picked up and transported elsewhere, just goes to show you they were not stable. Most were so decrepit (despite mons saying 1971) that the internal rebar was rotten away, and chunks of concrete were missing.
I deleted the pics because I did not think I would be talking about them ...
@tnt You will not find many blazed trees in either NY or NJ, these are not PLSS states, they are Colonial states and we work in a significantly different system.
The ferrous materials you speak of are the result of a law requiring monument to have iron in them or an iron pin with a cap or disk. That law only kicked in around 1990, before then, we usually set wooden stakes.
The ditch lines that you speak of are not necessarily indicative of a property line, they are firebreaks dug by the forest fire service to contain and control wildfires. Any axle that you find in the pinelands would be suspect as they likely were not set by a land surveyor in NJ.
Except for state routes 70 & 72, 206 through the farm belt and Salem County these wide and open roads do not exist anymore and haven't since the building boom of the very early 1980s.
In 3 weeks I will be 60 and I've been surveying in NJ for 42 years, statewide, but mostly in south jersey. Stone walls as boundaries do exist in far northern parts of the state and the jersey barrier seawalls that you speak of are not intended to denote a property line as they move and don't last long because saltwater eats concrete and that's why you see the exposed steel.
Those walls perpendicular to the coast are called groins and they have a very different purpose than seawalls. They're used to prevent sand from migrating up or down a beach, robbing beach area from one place and building up beach in another. In general, they don't work and cause more damage than they prevent. Sand migration is a natural tidal process that is dangerous to disrupt.
Orin Pilkey, a geologist at Duke University who died in December, detailed the process in several books in the 70s and 80s. He fought a long battle to prevent groins on the NC coast where it's tempting to prevent one barrier island's loss to be another's gain.
Pilkey called the results groin building "New Jerseyization," referring to the repeated building of groins and the resulting destruction of beaches in that state.
Your monument find in a failing groin is testament to the need for knowledgeable people like Pilkey to intervene in destructive coastal building practices. Saving a million-dollar house built too close to the tide does not justify destroying a coast.