More = Better
Horizontal measurements or sloped measurements. Make sure you identify which.
Do your best to place or use monuments that are unlikely to disappear any time soon. Also, you existing items that would not all disappear at the same time.
Roads get widened. Utilities get moved. Culverts get moved and/or replaced. Even house foundations are removed or the house added onto.
Again....More = Better
wassamatter Digger?
Three's not enough?;-)
Seriously, I agree. I've seen cornerposts that get replaced..only to find a 'new' 60d mysteriously driven into it three weeks later. More = Better
wassamatter Digger?
Far below now was a discussion about not setting a true corner in a roadway. The number of reference bars and how to label them was the focus. My concern is on the loss of the reference bars. I understand that placing shiny new coordinates on those bars will lead some people to claim that the bars are somewhat irrelevant. I disagree with that thought.
wassamatter Digger?
The coordinates don't make the markers irrelevant. But a publicly filed record of a properly done long OPUS session on a point pretty much fixes the location. It could be replaced where is was within a couple cm or better. The coordinate could be more stable than some of the tie outs I've seen (fence posts, telephone poles). Even curb and gutter isn't all that stable or permanent.
wassamatter Digger?
Leon,
We don't all use GPS routinely. We need as many 'solid' references as possible within reasonable distance of the true point being sought or replaced.
wassamatter Digger?
It's crazy not to pull (witness) monuments out of busy roadways. It's a safety issue. The roadway path is meant to carry tons and tons of steel 80 mph down the path. The only reason you should be out in this kind of environment should be an emergency.
I agree that you need to do what you have to do to get the appropriate signage, flagmen, coning, (detours) to recover the original monument, but then get it referenced out of the road. Treat your witness corner as your much-precioused original corner. Reference it off with 4, 5, 10 references and GPS. Bow down to the witness corner, and keep out of the roadway if at all possible.
It was stupid to run roadways right down section lines that control property corners for miles around. And it was/is even more crazy to keep getting out in that road and digging through extremely packed dirt, or asphalt or concrete and searching for that monument. Put in a witness (or references) and reference them
Okay, maybe I'm a wuss, or maybe not. I've been in many roads and coned them and probably nearly gotten killed more times than I know. But at what cost? Why doesn't the survey community figure out how to get this danger out of the way. Worse than that, I have seen hundreds of surveys that I have worked behind where the surveyor never digs up the section corner. They almost can't. You don't have GPS? Well they don't have the support of a flagging company to go tear out asphalt and upgrade a monument for their $2,000 parcel survey. (Not to mention the ones that charge $200 for the same survey). I see big cities where monuments have been paved and concreted over for years, and yet property surveys within the last year. We're shooting ourselves in the foot by not making corners accessable.
Remember, too, even when the BLM was making the rules, there wasn't nearly the danger and the technology for making killer machines they have out today; and they even spoke of witness corners for "highways".
