Last year I worked on a contract through the County Surveyor to reset centerline road monuments that had been and/or were going to be paved over during the annual summer road maintenance. It was fun work, we got to use a jack hammer and dig up buried monuments. I thought I would share some of our more interesting finds.
Pincushion in the road
Pincushion rod and rail road spike...no record of where the spike came from.
Another buried pincushion, the survey with the yellow cap said that they didn't locate anything from the survey with the orange cap.
This pincushion was important enough that it needed to be boxed.
"Holy crap we broke the rod"...nope, someone actually set this.
Another one, but the coup de grace is that someone actually set this rod...
...On top of this one.
Wow, amazing.
Sounds like a fun project.
Thanks for sharing.
Each photo reminded me of similar circumstances. The first smacks of setting a nail above a "buzz" instead of digging for the buried monument. The next two appear to be the common case of ignoring previous work and not bothering to even search for monuments. The short rods remind me of a time where I had found a capped bar in asphalt and accepted it only to learn a couple of years later that the DOT had found that bar and dug it up to discover it was only six inches long. Makes you wonder just how long any bar may actually be.
Thanks. It always is amazing what some have done in the past to record their work at whatever cost. Even if its a pincushion.
I'm sure they had a "valid" reason. :bored:
Is it just me, or do all of these look like a person with a yellow cap can measure better then the previous guy. All yellow caps, all in the same area. If I was doing that, it would make a lot of sense to toss- all of those yellow caps.
The pin cushion thing is one topic, but what about contractors paving over the monument in the first place. It seems to me that the county should require new boxes where none exist and rings raised where they do.
I can not tell you how many monument boxes I have had to dig out of A/C. Years ago I worked on a project where I need to break down a couple of sections where the monuments were in the road center lines. I had painted them all up in white on my first RTK pass only to find a paving crew on my second pass a couple of days later. Even with them marked up they were just paving them over. I dug them the corners they had already covered, in a not so clean manner, and then had a heated discussion on not just covering the remainder up. It just pisses me off that the public works departments don't seem to care about monument in the roadway.
Rant over.
Good morning America.
Do you ever just want to hang your head in shame over our "profession"?
The length of the stubby monuments don't bother me near as much as the obvious laziness and incompetence.
We were actually working with the County Surveyor and Public Works Department in conjunction with the paving crews. In the spring we went out and located all of the monuments that were scheduled to be paved over during the summer. Then in the winter/fall we went back out and set a new monument over top of the original that had been buried. Over a two year period we raised/reset somewhere around 300 - 400 monuments.
