Post-natural disaster surveying

@dougie I don't see why land surveyors or architects who draft by hand should be a barrier to submitting officially required drawings in electronic form. An example of this is the Vermont Land Survey Library. The survey is submitted in PDF format. I'm not a surveyor, but I don't see anything that requires the surveyor to include state plane coordinates or latitude & longitude on the drawing. So the surveyor who likes to draft by hand just goes down to Staples and has them scan the drawing.

How many posts have been made in this forum where surveyors say the CAD files never leave their office? Whenever another design professional wants an electronic version of a survey, they get a PDF with all the good stuff stripped out. How is that any different than scanning a mylar drawing?

I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm a notary, although I seldom use the qualification. Our state recently passed a uniform law on land records that allows any notary to take an electronically signed land document (example: deed) with an electronic notarization, print it, and certify it as a true copy. Then it can be recorded in the land records; very handy for towns that are not equipped to accept electronic land records (example: every town and city in Vermont). The down side is that all the security measures incorporated in the electronic signatures just went into the bit bucket.

@lurker

I've always kind of wondered that too.?ÿ If I remember right, from one of the textbooks in school there was a line about land ownership describing 'a cone from the middle of the earth extending into the heavens above'.?ÿ I took that to mean the cone never moves even though the land itself might.?ÿ It wouldn't surprise me if my interpretation was wrong though.

One of big reasons for the move to the modernized NSRS is the fact that the earth moves. The NGS will be tracking both plate movement through Euler Pole Parameters, and local movement through the Intra-Frame Deformation Model, both of which are integral to NATRF2022.

At this point, while coordinates are not a cure-all by any stretch, the ability to track plate and local movement is pretty darn good and continues to improve. The vast majority of CONUS can be tracked and modelled by the EPP; in those areas NATRF2022 coordinates will actually not change over time - although the NGS will periodically be publishing Reference Epoch Coordinates. In areas of local movement the IFDM will be applied. The blueprint documents for NATRF2022 do a better job of explaining it than me.

It sounds like there's a lot of concern that as soon as we have coordinates on a point, all surveyors are somehow going to flip a switch and ignore all other forms of evidence. I don't see that happening. We've stood with one foot in the past and one in the future for a long time, as @williwaw said upthread. We can continue to do so.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/12/weather/california-megaflood-study/index.html

This article really caught my attention given the pervasive drought in the west. Pendulum always swings both ways. I'm sure a good many California surveyors are more familiar with the problems associated with subsidence in the Central Valley from over drawing ground water. Throw in an atmospheric river fire hose.... They state the recovery costs could be 5x Katrina and they are over due for another event like 1861-1862, but likely worse with warmer temperatures holding more water vapor. I'd think after such an event, a backhoe would become standard equipment looking for corners.

?ÿ