> As one surveyor in a similar situation told me, "You don't know what you're talking about! I paid $40,000 for this gear. Are you telling me it's wrong? I staked my stuff out to deltas of zero by zero!"
>
> I asked what he had used to localize.
>
> His response, "Localize? You don't understand this RTK stuff."
>
> |-)
Did you report the poor dumb #$% to the board for incompetence? Or are you going to let the civil lawsuits put him out of business?
B-)
> I asked what he had used to localize.
>
> His response, "Localize? You don't understand this RTK stuff."
Me: "I've been hired by the quarry to follow up on some QA/QC concerns they had about the site control and anchor bolt stake out."
Other Surveyor: "Those anchor bolts should be dead on, when we staked them out our initialization was hot"
o.O
Being a foot off in elevation is a problem.
If the house foundation is a foot high, we may say great -- better than a foot low.
I worked on a condo project where the bench mark was claimed to be a foot off by
the flood control district. The engineer paid for a foot (0.8') of fill for the
entire project rather than make the developer mad.
If a sewage treatment plant is staked a foot low, that is not necessary good news.
When a flood hits, the typical low elevation guy in the subdivision or city is
the sewage treatment plant. Think of all of that poop that now floats due to a
lower elevation.
Larry is SO dead-on.
Sponsor a small "lunch-and-learn" with the guys who went with the lowballer.
Subway sammiches is fine.
Show them what happened. Don't disparage anyone, just show them.
The fact that you took the time (and brought lunch to boot) to give them an education and not just make a one-time "save" can earn you a client for life.
> OK. I pull up to a job, get started and discover I disagree with everything by 18" to 24". Next thing I do is check myself against some known standards recognizing that I might have a problem. Anyone too stupid to check themselves before announcing to the nation that someon else does bad work deserves to have it announced to the nation that THEY ARE THE ONES DOING BAD WORK.
I was doing some staking for a contractor on an IDOT job. We are held to a 6mm tolerance. The IDOT resident engineer is somehow checking the location of our stakes. I see him checking our offset stakes with a fiberglass tape. When he calls me off, I educated him on the accuracy of said tape. This did't sit well with him so he has his own contracted survey firm come out and measure my stakes. They call them off by around 2cm. The RE sets up a meeting with his bosses, the big wigs for the general contractor, and us. He's fuming about our work and makes it clear to everyone how bad we are at our job. He's holding the report from his surveyors. I tuck my tail between my legs, ask for the report, and let everyone know I'm going to review the report and fix my stuff. After a few more negative comments by the RE, everyone leaves the meeting.
First thing I do is look at their setup info:
setup on #234, backsight #252 - horizontal distance error shows 0.025m
They used points with known error (by their own field notes) to call us off.
By this time, everyone from the meeting was gone and we were still left looking like incomeptent boobs.
The RE never questioned any of our work from that day on and I have never seen him on another job since then. We have since let our work speak for itself and everyone who was at that meeting is more than trusting of our work now.