Intersection Stations Revisited

[mloser]

There have been a few posts about intersection/landmark stations, e.g. steeples, antennas, water towers, etc, and determining if the one you see is the described station. Here is an example KW3013 that will show how even the USGS can get it wrong. I was using my GPSr to get to this site and could see the church before I got to it, but it appeared way too new to have been described in 1942. Instead of driving to where I knew the church to be, I trusted my GPSr and went to the coordinates it had. There I found a monument marking the site of the OLD church, with a half melted bell and the original church sign from the old church. Yet the 1998 recovery by the USGS stated that the new church is on the same site as in 1942. Not only was this impossible based on the coordinates, but it is unlikely that the steeple could be exactly where the old one was. And if the person doing the recovery had gone to the original site, which is described pretty clearly, and just as clearly NOT the location of the new church, he/she would have known that the new church was not at the old site.

Evenfall made note of this sort of issue in

this thread and it has been brought up a few other times in this forum.

I think I have enough evidence to send this to NGS as a destroyed mark (one of 4 I recovered today. Bad day!), and have it removed from the database.

 

Matt

[GH55]

I ran into a similar problem with a station near here: church spire observied in 1931, church burned in 1941, new church built, Power Squadron recovered new church as the station in 1994. What is not similar is a (WCS) of the USGS submitting a recovery as if the rebuilt spire were good enough to use.

 

As with yours, anyone should have noticed that the church had no tall spire, and if they actually looked at the church, the cornerstone was a dead giveaway.

 

To prove MG0680 - Elvira Church Spire was destroyed, I contacted the reference librarian at the nearest town with a long running daily paper, gave them an approximate date, and a week later, I got a photocopy of the article, complete with before and after pictures, describing how the church burned in 1941.

 

I sent the newspaper article, a picture of the new church, and a closup picture of the cornerstone of the new church as proof the station was destroyed. Deb Brown accepted the report and this week entered a recovery report showing the station "Destroyed."

 

Here is the Geocaching page for Elvira Church Spire

[evenfall]

Matt,

 

You are completely on the right line of thinking, but there is one thing we could keep in mind.

 

Before 2000 ( Y2K, Remember when we used to type or say that a lot?) Selective availability was a limiting factor on all consumer grade GPS and there were not all that many units around. Accuracy was not all that in the consumer grade world. Before the 90's there was GPS but it was not widely used among all surveyors, it was still pretty new. Even then they were not driving around with it running in the cab of their vehicle.

 

So if we think about it, some of these surveyors from various agencies had little more than the datasheets description. Without setting up and turning angles from a known point, Optically we have no Idea what the Coordinates for a different spot is. At this point, it is no different than just walking around looking at numbers. We still do not have a known coordinate. They would need to train an instrument on the steeple and calc it's position to know that this assumed location has moved, unless it was obvious in the Datasheet's Narrative Description. GPS is cool because the Constellation constantly radio triangulates itself and knows where it is before helping a unit on the ground. It always comes from the premise of a Known point, no matter where it is.

 

In other words, it is likely that without local knowledge, which is common in Government Survey teams, as they often traveled the country, they could sometimes get it wrong. They had less to go on than we do now with a GPSr. Just like all people, when it is one of those days, they may not have tried as hard as they could have, May not have taken field notes as well as they should have... the list of fallibility's goes on and on...

 

We could say they could have done better because they were Surveyors, but all that would be is a hope or wish, not a fact. It can happen to us all, and we always have to work hard for it not to. This is in part why The field of Surveying relies heavily on a system of practices and procedures. Just like a checklist a Pilot would do before they fly, it help us stay consistent. It can only help us if we use it. Similarly, because the history of many of these landmarks are not known to us is, we too must really work hard to confirm we have the real, described object. It is so easy to be wrong. Much more difficult many times over to confirm we are correct.

 

I do a lot of my hunting based on the Datasheet alone. I prefer the challenge from this method. It isn't for everyone and can be more difficult in the hunt phase, But I confirm the position with the GPSr after I find, and there have been times I have gone to the GPS to find a station when there did not appear to be any other choice. It is fine with me to change methods in order to get to the final result. There have been a couple stations I went back to a couple times to sort them out before I concluded what was what. Things can go wrong with both Landmarks as well as brass disk stations as we know.

 

GPS is a tool, and one we didn't have up until not all that long ago. It helps give us the evidence we need to make accurate determinations, and that is most of the payoff for us, isn't it?

 

Feel free to prove to the NGS that that old landmark is gone. It is helpful to have deadwood like that landmark removed from the database so it won't waste anyone's time anymore.

 

Thanks Matt,

 

Rob

[mloser]

Rob,

 

Something I didn't mention in my previous post is that the surveyor doing these 1998 recoveries seems to have researched the area, or been FROM the area.

 

Take a look at KW0565 especially, where he claims PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE of the mark's history, and at KW0563 where he noted the year the building was removed. So it really makes me wonder what he was thinking when he said the new church was on the site of the old church! First of all, it isn't, and he should have known that from the description alone, as the old church is at an intersection, and the new one is along the road, definitely not at an intersection, and of course the chances of getting the steeple at the exact position of the old one, even if the new church WAS on the old site, is near zero, even if they tried to do it. I was doubly surprised at this error based on the other recoveries by this person.

 

And, yeah, I remember Y2K, because as an IT professional it was a major part of my job for most of 1999 to ensure that every computer system in our company did not spontaneously combust at midnight. Needless to say, none did, and business went on as usual.

[+NorStar]

I had a similar encounter on the 16th. I recovered benchmark MY6161 that had the street intersection description for the right church (Methodist Church), but the coordinates led to another church (the Federated Church - Congregational and Baptist) at least a quarter mile away. The methodist church has a more prominent spire, so I believe that this is the correct mark. My guess is that the person first observing the mark took coordinates off a map for the other church, not confirming the road intersection.