As part of a geodetic control project for a nearby city, I was asked to monument the location of a 1/4 corner following street construction. The 1/4 corner falls in the new roadway, so a standard city street monument -- brass disk in a concrete post enclosed in a valve box -- was called for. I set straddlers for the construction contractor to use, and asked that they notify me when the monument was in place so I could stamp the disk. The same contractor was responsible for one new geodetic monument install, which was specified as 1-meter Feno spike and disk.
I got the call a couple of days ago that the 1/4 corner monument was ready, so drove out there to stamp it. When I opened the lid on the valve box, here's what I found:
[MEDIA=youtube]-y9WHQocko4[/MEDIA]
Aside from seeing that they had installed the wrong type of monument -- with a disk stamped identically to the geodetic mark a mile or two away -- I noticed that the disk wasn't seated properly, which led me to grab it. The fact that I could twist it easily meant that they didn't deploy the prongs. After I shot the little video, I pulled a little harder and lifted the whole spike out of the ground.
Back to the drawing board...
Oops! Thanks for the reminder that some things are not correct no matter how much we sometimes want to believe they are.
