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| Sunday, September 5, 2010 |
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| A Story From The Field |
Back in the mid 70's, I was running glass for several engineering firms all about the same time. One of the outfits located out on Mission Gorge Road, in San Diego, had just landed a job in the east county that required a shot to a control monument on top of a mountain. The two surveyors were elderly guys who usually surveyed by themselves, but they explained neither one of them had the legs to trudge up the side of that mountain to hold the triple prism; that's what I was for. They explained that the company had just purchased a "device" and that they also had a "box". Turned out that the device was a Geodimeter 120 that was capable of making a slope distance measurement to suit their need for trig leveling. Oh yeah, the box was their terminology for a hand-held HP 41 that they were just marveling about in the truck on the way out to the site. I guess that had been the hand-crank or curta generation.
Well, they pointed me to the grade I had to climb and I progressed upwards at an even pace so as not to tire myself out in the July heat, thankful that it was still somewhat cool at 10:00 in the morning. The hike felt good and I got to the top and found the point they needed. I radioed them that I was plumb and ready - several minutes of silence went by until I heard their message #%!?# and that the EDM was not making the shot. Luckily, they had the case with instruction booklet in the truck. They decided to read the booklet at that time, which had the information that the slope distance could not be measured if the vertical angle exceeded 20 degrees! So, they then had to reposition themselves higher above the floor of the canyon to make the shot to me. After some waiting, they finally relocated and made the shot. That was all they needed, a tie to the benchmark I was at, to complete their earlier work.
So, on the way back to the city the two old salts lit up their cigarettes and joked about what a job this had been. I asked them if they had calced the results of the measurement while I had hiked back down the slope. The party chief said no, but that he would do it now. He reaches for his field book and then remarks "oh, that's right, we forgot the fieldbook today, I wrote the slope distance and vertical angle on my matchbook cover." He turns to his old chainman for the matchbook he had given him a few miles earlier to light up his cigarette. The other old guy says "holy cow!! that was the last match, I tossed the matchbook out the window! I didn't notice you weren’t writin in a field book! #!@##%". So they turned the truck around, and drove back a couple of miles to about where he thought he may have tossed the matchbook out the window. They made a slow drive along that route and we could see nothing alongside the roadway. The chief decided to head in for some construction staking that afternoon- to this day I don't know if they returned to hike up that mountain themselves to re-shoot the point or picked a contour off a county map to get their elevation. |
By Dave Eisenberg
Survey, Subcontractor |
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