I was surveying north of the big floods that hit Eastern Kentucky today on an interesting 4,000 acre project and over lunch, saw the President was stopping in to make an appearance at the scene of the disaster.?ÿ I'm sure there are all kinds of state and federal monies being thrown at the disaster area and I got to wondering about the possibility of re-marking property corners throughout the area as part of the rebuild effort.?ÿ It would be a huge endeavor but if the right forms were submitted to the right office, I wonder if something like that could be done.?ÿ I've never heard of a large single effort to fix that particular problem from a well funded disaster relief.?ÿ On the west side of Kentucky last year, a tornado absolutely flattened a town and somebody on this board posted about going back in to stake a lot or two and there wasn't much to work with.?ÿ In an area with massive flooding and streets washed out, houses floating away, fences rooted up, I can imagine a huge percentage of property corners have ended up on their way to New Orleans, Mark Twain style.?ÿ Kentucky does not have any sort of PLSS system and most surveys except for divisions generally aren't even recorded at the courthouse.?ÿ County Surveyor is not a paid position and little or nothing in the way of record keeping if anybody even holds the office.?ÿ Massive lost markers are a real problem and I would guess it will not be addressed but I would love to be involved in a project like that.?ÿ It seems very "interesting", sort of like the Chinese curse, "may your life be interesting".
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Has anybody heard of a concerted government sponsored re-monumenting effort after Katrina, Sandy, etc.
Tom,
There were funds earmarked for just such an effort in the tornado hit areas.
Surveyors tend to dismiss the utility of having coordinates on boundary corners, but I have always maintained that accurate, well documented coordinates is what is needed is situations like this.?ÿ
When I worked at the USACE in the early 80's, all of the large reservoirs I worked on had NAD27 SPC on all of the boundaries, and it was really easy to find when people moved or destroyed our corners, which they sometimes did . We would survey to the cooordinate and find a hole where the monument was.?ÿ
I go to FIG conferences yearly (going to Warsaw in September), and it seems like we are one of the only countries that discounts the utility of coordinates.?ÿ
Especially with CORS and RTN's around the country, we should really be elevating coordinates in the hierarchy. Any boundary work that I have ever done (admittedly not a lot), I always put cm accurate coordinates on whatever I find or set.?ÿ ?ÿ
?ÿ ?ÿ I would love to see how that panned out in Dawson Springs.?ÿ Did one firm do the whole town or was it piecemeal one lot at a time??ÿ That would be a great article if whoever was involved had some literary bent.
For coordinates to belong in the hierarchy above some other things, all surveyors must supply proper metadata and take into account crustal motion over time. We see too many examples on this forum where that wouldn't be done well due to confusion about datum realizations, grid/ground, etc.
Having coordinates on multiple points in the vicinity could allow relative positioning, but will field crews do the comparison or just read what it says on the data collector with yesterday's 'Here" as a basis?
There was a big mudslide in my County back in 2018 and the County was able to secure FEMA funds to monument the roads that were damaged or destroyed. Of course this is in a small town you some of you may have heard of...Montecito, CA, a whole lot of money resides there, which probably had something to do with getting those funds. The County Surveyor claimed it was the first time FEMA funds were secured specifically for survey work.
It's occurred to me in the past that, in non-recording states in particular, re-establishing property corners following a large scale, widespread disaster of the kind to recently befall Kentucky, would be incredibly difficult. For the most part all of the records are held by private surveyors who are likely not relying on a wide area HARN NAD83 to reference their coordinates. There just doesn't appear to be any interest in creating a large scale cadastre of coordinates on a county or region wide basis outside of GIS. Local governments just don't appreciate the value in creating such a system and private surveyors aren't that interested in giving away their data. Working for utilities, it puts me in an interesting position from the standpoint that over the years we have amassed survey data over a very wide area, all tied into CORS, but the problem is that the utility isn't in the surveying and mapping business. It's simply a support function to assure their resources are properly located. I fear at some point all that data that has been collected over the years will end up in the proverbial dumpster because they don't have any reason to hang onto it. As time marches on and many of these monuments disappear, replacing them will fall on the lowest bidder and in my experience, they won't go back where they were. I see it all the time. Road project takes out an original GLO corner and no provision is made to perpetuate it. I have a tie to it but no means of propagating that data and some years later I find another surveyor has proportioned the corner back in, just not where it originally was. Sort of like backing up a hard drive, it's not an issue until it blows up. Sorry for my ramblings, just something of a pebble in my shoe. Carry on.
In the August 2022 issue of xyHT magazine, there is an article about the Swedish nationwide Real Time Network. The controlling agency is the "national property agency". Here is an excerpt from the article...
Note that all property surveys are done by government surveyors.
I have a friend who works in the geodetic department there.?ÿ
https://bt.e-ditionsbyfry.com/publication/?m=36207&i=753742&p=10&ver=html5
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At some point the resistance to properly positioning and documenting property corners in the NSRS begins to look a lot more like protecting surveyors than protecting the public.
Considering how ubiquitous GNSS has become, I don't see a problem with eventually shifting to a coordinated cadastre. The NGS OPUS shared solutions program offers a glimpse of what a future solution could look like. A verified method for tying observations to the NSRS, complete with positional statistics and metadata to boot.
Especially considering that NATRF2022 is 4D with modelled velocities and epoch date coordinates, the usual arguments against a coordinated cadastre aren't holding much water these days.
Local governments just don't appreciate the value in creating such a system
Local governments don't want the liability of providing this kind of information to the public.
Case in point: Pierce County provided a data base for the entire county, with all the monuments they had coordinates on; local surveyors were using these coordinates to base their surveys. A note on the survey would say something like; position based on published coordinates, corner not visited...
Put the fear into the county, and they pulled the data. It's back up, but it's limited.
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@john-hamilton makes a good point; but no one knows when disaster will happen, and to what extent. Do put coordinates, tied to property boundaries everywhere? To what extent; every boundary corner? If not, who choose what gets a coordinate?
Points to ponder...
@dougie I get it. Our State DOT has performed and recorded numerous Record of Surveys on many of their more important ROW corridors, complete with published coordinates on recovered control throughout the projects. Absolute gold to someone like me when a lot of these positions eventually get wiped clean by development, however there is one local surveyor who will record a plat using their data verbatim. Doesn't even bother showing record vs. measured. It's really rather annoying to me professionally. When I brought up the subject with one of their head guys, he was like, 'What can we do? We can't stop him.' I don't believe there is any good cause that can't be abused in one way or another, so we just do away with good causes? Where does that leave us? I don't pretend to know the answer and most likely I'll never run short of rant fodder. The solution possibly could be a requirement for recorded surveys to show an OPUS solution on at least one recovered monument along with a reference bearing in a standard?ÿ projection. But if there's no recording requirement, I suppose the point is moot. In poorer, more vulnerable communities where these disasters often take place, I'm sure they have higher priorities.
While I agree with you; there's always that 1 outlier; I was at an LSAW Board meeting and the State Surveyor said something along the lines of: Does anyone still hand draft anymore? And a surveyor from Eastern Washington raised his hand and said; yes, I do. So the idea of submitting cad drawings was shut down.
I did a job for ADA compliance at a gas station in Tacoma; and asked the Architect if I could have his CAD file. He said he doesn't use cad, he does all his drafting by hand...
@dougie One foot in the future, one in the past. I guess that what keeps it interesting.
While I agree with you; there's always that 1 outlier; I was at an LSAW Board meeting and the State Surveyor said something along the lines of: Does anyone still hand draft anymore? And a surveyor from Eastern Washington raised his hand and said; yes, I do. So the idea of submitting cad drawings was shut down.
Maybe I'm a jerk, but I think that once technology has been around long enough and is in common usage, that ought to guide standard practice rather than letting one or two individuals hold everything up.
If we're serious about protecting the public, surely that mentality must extend to utilizing best practices and industry-standard technology.
In the case of CAD, we're talking what, about 50-60 years of use? Satellite positioning wasn't too far behind it, either.
If we're serious about protecting the public
While I agree with you:
How are we protecting those stuck in the Stone Age? When you say "Public" you can't cherry pick those that know what they're doing, and how to do it...
