There was some discussion concerning how windy it needs to get to stop working.?ÿ
I can say yesterday it exceeded the limit.
Gusts up to 65mph.
That was too much.?ÿ
Well, 65 is too much.
I've never had to quit due to wind.
Pouring rain has stopped me.
Lack of sunshine too.
N
About 20 years ago I was the most junior party chief in the company, and was therefore assigned the junkiest old truck in the fleet. It was one of the early 90's heaps that they couldn't get the paint to stick on worth a darn, something to do with no longer using lead in the paint I think. At any rate, the paint was peeling off this thing bad. One day my I-man & I were trying to close out a traverse before the wind got too bad to stand up, something like 25 in town, but probably pushing 35 out where we were. We were trying to crank the closing angle, I had the truck parked to try to keep some wind off the gun, but he was struggling to get a decent split due to the gun shaking in the wind. I looked up once to see a big chunk of paint peel off the hood of the truck from a big gust of wind, and a few seconds later as he was sighting the backsight for the last portion of what turned out to be the last angle we turned that day, he watched the backsight blow over in the wind. Lucky for us it was just a range pole on a tribrach & tripod (no prism), and it didn't go all the way over due to the rocks & hammers we had sitting on all the tripod feet. We called that angle good & picked it up for the day. After that my gauge for when it was too windy to work was if the paint was peeling off the truck. A few years later I was assigned a new truck & suddenly became known as the guy who would never quit working due to the wind.
After about 2 months with a robot, I see that an advantage is that the gun's HI doesn't depend on the I-man's height and comfort. I set up on a slab of a house where the 2nd floor got blown off in Hurricane Irma. It was breezy and the wind was magnified by the house. So I set up about 3 feet high and put weights on the legs for the safety of the precious instrument. Conversely, yesterday I set it up over 6.5 feet high to see over the traffic on a highway project.?ÿ
I, am a fair weather surveyor.
I don't now EXACTLY how many large projects that I have worked on over the last 50+ years, but I'm pretty sure that every one of them had a Control Point named WINDY. Some of them (post GPS) had 120 penny nails, Cotton Spindles, Roof Spads, or other paraphernalia driven into cracks in bed rock with cables and turn-buckles used to secure the "base" in a solid fashion. It seems like the best "points" are always the [potty mouth] windy [potty mouth] ones.
Loyal?ÿ?ÿ
Old time control was set on high points.
On a ridge there will usually be a "sweet spot" where the wind compresses and really intensifies.
Early on switching to GPS I was stupid enough to set a "major" base point in one of those "sweet spots" because I was more interested in line of sight than I needed to be.
That is an awful spot, even on calm days you needed to watch out for any loose paper. I doubt you could have stayed on your feet there yesterday, step back from the ridge edge just a few paces and it cuts down the wind probably in half. Live and learn. ?ÿ
I lost an R8 in the Monongahela River when a sudden storm came up and blew the tripod off of a lock wall. We tried dragging the river for it with a grappling hook but never found it. Another time a tripod with tribrach and prism blew off of the wall into a dewatered lock chamber, it slammed against the opposite lock wall and fell to the bottom. Only the tribrach was slightly damaged after a fall of about 30 feet onto a rocky bottom.?ÿ
A day or so after the Delta Mariner took out a span of the Eggners Ferry Bridge on Ky. Lake, the Ky. DOT surveyor had an S6 set up on one side of the gap on a windy day. ?ÿNot sure what he was shooting, but he told me at some point he turned around and it was gone. Not sure if they ever found it.?ÿ
Quite a few years back, we were slope staking irrigation canals for the Bureau of Recs, outside of the TriCities in Washington state. Dry, dusty sandy country, pretty flat also. I was using a level and didn??t have to take a turn very often. The wind was crankin pretty good, ?ÿwhen it was finally time for me to move, I looked down at my boots and discovered I had sand dunes drifted in behind my legs! ???? That??s windy.?ÿ
It was one of the early 90's heaps that they couldn't get the paint to stick on worth a darn
I had one of those, a 1990 F-150.?ÿ Peeled like crazy.?ÿ I drove it for 15 years, though.
Ford offered to repaint it without charge, but said they'd need to keep the truck for 3 weeks.?ÿ I passed.
