Cheap help, lazy Party Chief.?ÿ ??ÿ
Cheap help, lazy Party Chief.?ÿ ??ÿ
This....I'll wager that I could count on one hand (with fingers left over) ?ÿthe number of pin cushions I've seen over the last 30 years that were the result of a surveyor making a conscious decision to set a new?ÿmonument adjacent to an existing one that he or his crew had previously found.?ÿ ?ÿ?ÿ
"Idaho needs to get to the root of the cause, which from all the pin farms in the State, is to have a higher standard on who gets a Survey License, make the requirements or the test harder."
Yes, you are mostly correct.?ÿ This wouldn't solve the problems with the current license holders (yes, a minority of them are the major problem), but it would sure help in years down the road.?ÿ Unfortunately, currently we seem to be focused only on making it easier to get a license in Idaho, and pass rules and laws to "fix" the incompetency's of those handed a license.?ÿ
?ÿ
Sometimes (maybe most times) these happen because I can measure better than the last guy 🙂 or better than even I did last year. As time goes on there become more conflicts no matter how professional we think we are, I mean 50-100 years ago there were mostly original monuments, now lots get split and re-split with better and better measuring tools with no budget for research, 100 years ago you probably needed a fraction of the budget for research as there was little to think about.
The problem I see is surveyors don't explain themselves very well in the written record they leave, makes it much harder to follow in the original footsteps if there is little evidence EXCEPT maybe an old monument there is no record of and no idea how it got there.
One of my early mentors taught me (drilled it into my very being) how to write survey narratives (reports) that accompanied every survey that explained in great detail the who, what, when, why, etc. I was told not only do I do this for others, BUT for myself, so I can follow in my footsteps 20-30 years later. To ignore one of his corners you better have some real solid reason to do so and more than my measurements are better than yours! I always look at this written narrative and while the conclusion the previous surveyor came to might disagree with my conclusion, but is equally plausible and more importantly as defensible in a court, then instead of doing my own thing, I almost always take what is there. The real issue is we don't talk to each other, don't explain our reasoning and leave it to "professional" opinions which could arguably be many for the same corner and then operate as a bunch of cowboys jamming new iron in the ground instead of even considering any previous work could be as correct or more correct. That all takes time which equals money and is the root of many bad boundary monuments!
SHG
I haven't yet, I need some information from him first before I poke the bear.
Here is a link to one such survey back in 1979 when I was just getting started in the profession (note I wasn't even an LSIT yet, let alone a PLS, just a crew member). Note the large detail on the three pages of accompanying narrative, this is how I learned to survey and even though I am primarily a control surveyor now being an owner/employee at an aerial mapping company, old habits are still there, for a simple mapping control project I have a hard time getting a narrative under two pages 🙂
ftp://share.co.crook.or.us/CS_577.pdf (from public records in Oregon and a big plug right here for recording laws, no secret surveys here!)
I bet if we all surveyed to the care of my mentor (who is still with us in retirement and I still see him occasionally) who was doing this detail 40+ years ago, we wouldn't have as many screwed up surveys. I am guessing any one of us could take this 1979 record and successfully retrace the survey without issue. Note that some of the fence lines were accepted based on evidence in 1979 and testimony of land owners who are now long gone. The narrative paints a picture of evidence for accepting boundaries that may not be so obvious 38+ years later and now 38 years later it seems to me it would be foolish of someone to reject corners just because they weren't where the math computes them to be to the 0.01 foot. Without the detail, a 2018 surveyor might be inclined to do something different, but with a defensible survey with detail in hand why would you or should you do that? Don't be afraid to explain in detail your evidence and logical basis of your survey, if we are just guessing then my survey is better than yours mentality prevails and so do pin cushions.
SHG
Here is a link to one such survey back in 1979 when I was just getting started in the profession (note I wasn't even an LSIT yet, let alone a PLS, just a crew member). Note the large detail on the three pages of accompanying narrative, this is how I learned to survey and even though I am primarily a control surveyor now being an owner/employee at an aerial mapping company, old habits are still there, for a simple mapping control project I have a hard time getting a narrative under two pages 🙂
(from public records in Oregon and a big plug right here for recording laws, no secret surveys here!)
I bet if we all surveyed to the care of my mentor (who is still with us in retirement and I still see him occasionally) who was doing this detail 40+ years ago, we wouldn't have as many screwed up surveys. I am guessing any one of us could take this 1979 record and successfully retrace the survey without issue. Note that some of the fence lines were accepted based on evidence in 1979 and testimony of land owners who are now long gone. The narrative paints a picture of evidence for accepting boundaries that may not be so obvious 38+ years later and now 38 years later it seems to me it would be foolish of someone to reject corners just because they weren't where the math computes them to be to the 0.01 foot. Without the detail, a 2018 surveyor might be inclined to do something different, but with a defensible survey with detail in hand why would you or should you do that? Don't be afraid to explain in detail your evidence and logical basis of your survey, if we are just guessing then my survey is better than yours mentality prevails and so do pin cushions.
SHG