Civil engineering career thread

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Lenardo

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it does go under boston harbor...to deer island. that is the outflow - pumped up into the treatment plant.
it starts @park street, ends @deer island 7.2 miles long.
 

Lenardo

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God i hate people who do shitty field work and research. got this site plan(cad file and plan pdf) for a lot from an out of city surveyor/engineer for 12 seaver street in boston(roxbury district) - initial view plan looked ok.. one big thing i noticed is he showed the clients garage 4 feet over the neighbors property and went...naw i don't thiink so, since we were hired to take over the job to do the design for the new dwelling and addition, we sent our crew out to do our site survey to locate all the street utilities, the buildings, garage, fences etc...just to check.... we ended up changing the lot lines a bit.

i still was not..Happy.. with the solution since it still had the garage over the lot line by 10 inches...so i sent the boss out (ya i can do that) to get a bit more survey information. just to check alignment of the street behind locus...quick site check, back of sidewalks and a few building corners (especially the building at the corner across locus, the street layout for that street says that the building was on street line (and looking at google maps, it does look that way).

then i double checked deeds for neighbors to see if the original guy gave everyone what they were supposed to have by deed., and the original surveyor shorted the guy on homestead street's corner fucking 10 feet of frontage...10 fucking feet.. (he gave the guy 100 feet and he owned -by deed and plan- 110 feet...so i checked the city of boston street layout to see if walnut have got widened (it hadn't).

i said fuck it , time to start fresh, erased all property lines and started "fresh" giving everyone deed distances, adding in the street taking and reversion for seaver street from 1906.....the whole shebang... the garage that the ORIGINAL guy said was 4 feet over the line into the neighbors land, and our intial survey before we expanded our work to check street to street shit- was 0.8' over property line, well now that garage is 4' INSIDE the lot.

the building face across homestead that was on the line, and the back sidewalk on "our" side of the street were within 1 minute of being parallel... a bound that we originally thought was a 2 foot offset bound (fucking no mans land in that area, huge open space no houses etc back of sidewalk is off by 3 feet from street line) is in fact a 5' offset bound holding said bound @5' offset, holding neighbors land @90degrees from homestead, all the street taking stuff from 1906 is checking to 0.03' --and is checking 50' from the stone wall across the street-walnut ave. and is checking street width distance for homestead to the building that is on street line across the street...

all this came about because to put a driveway to the rear of the lot, we needed 10 feet from bldg to property line and we had 9.6 according to our first solution..after all that above crap... 12.8'...

now to try to explain to the client why he has to move his addition 2 feet to the right.....
 
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Picasso3

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i feel your pain, we had some surveys come in from the good ole boys( client hired) that were a complete shit pile disaster. ends up taking 4x the design time.
 

Lenardo

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Yep- exactly

here is a good one,

client hired us a while ago to survey his property because and i QUOTE "all the plans are wrong " so the land in question is LAND COURT land (which by Definition the plans HAVE to be right-it is a requirement) we are like, ok whatever.

do our survey,.

locate record bounds from land court,,,and it all matches up with land court.. "no no that is not right", - now if the client WAS right...over 100 houses - that has been built and lived in for over 50 years, the houses are not on the lots they own, the street is in the wrong spot, etc..and which in my opinion, the court would just say, too bad, the plans that match up with current conditions are "right" case over..be a perfect justification for using adverse possession to "fix" the lot lines, except for one thing, by law you CANNOT adverse possess land court land in MA.

guy produces the land court - survey- plan from 1911..and goes. that point "here" is there, so i am like oookkaaaayyy..

i get a copy of the plan- and all plans, deeds, takings etc of the area, and reproduce- as best i can from a reallllly poor condition survey plan- the original traverse which plots the land via angles - to the nearest minute- and distances, with 90degree tie distances to walls... my initial go thru didn't "close" by ~150 feet(this is BAD!)- i went clockwise around the perimeter. so i am like hmm... decide to take the same " start point" then go around the survey perimeter counterclockwise - to see if i had messed up a distance or angle, and it closed well (off by ~.2') if i removed the first distance i had used originally going the other way.

whipping out a magnifying glass, that distance was not a traverse distance but a tie to a wall that intersects the traverse line... using this fix and plotting the 1911 location of his house on the plan, then overlaying the Land Court plans of record on the survey...matched "perfectly"....plotting our field survey of said house ...matched "perfectly" (considering i had to scale the house dimensions on the original plan... show the resultant plan to the client and i quote my client "no that is not right"

so we go out and expand our survey, to humor the guy(@900 dollars a day field survey work), the guy shows us a bound- Across the road and down the street, and goes, this bound here is supposed to be this bound (pointing at a bound from the original land court plan) since i HAVE all the record plans- including the state County LAYOUT of the road said bound is on, i am like not a fucking chance in hell (not saying this to the client, but to the field crew and the boss- who all agree with me)... tell the client that bound is "this" bound on the county layout, this bound has nothing to do with your property...and of course, he does not believe us...

fast forward to last week, we get a certified mail..from court... our clients daughter is getting sued by a different survey company and they are asking for us to show up and testify about what we found about the property.. we are thinking that -unbeknownst to us they had a different survey company previously and never paid them, this are getting sued.

our position will be, if we knew that survey was never paid, we never would have taken the job, as to the survey work relating the position of the house on the land in question...our client is nuts, the land court plans - according to all the evidence we have found says that they are correct.(every monument we found for the survey was within 0.1' as shown on the land court and other plans of record)...
 

Intrinsic

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Thought we had a more general certification thread or Engineering thread, couldn't find it so I'll ask here:

Thinking about going through the PE exam. My last career didn't require it and was never particularly encouraging employees to go through with it (or offering financial reimbursement for the test or prep). But my new job, while also not requiring it, seems to encourage it, will cover all the costs, and most of the engineers I'm working with have their PE. Leaving school over 10 years ago it was a goal that I kind of lost sight of b/c of the first job, but now have that itch to do it. More for personal reasons than professional although it wouldn't kill me career wise or anything.

So, motivations mostly established, has anyone revisited this so many years after being out of school? Or have any advice to approaching it. Will probably just get a couple of reference materials and start going through stuff as a refresher. Eventually I'll just have to commit though and set a date to work towards. Otherwise it'll get put off indefinitely.

More specifically this would be in Electrical and not Civil, which is sort of why I left that out of the above.
 

Lenardo

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heh :) been a while

i got a good one for you...

so doing these plans for a client for a project in somerville ma

comments back from the city reviewer wants
we are proposing to install a 4" cl56 dicl fire service for a building rehab/rebuild (and a 2" copper domestic water)

2" domestic is fine, just a direct tap then a corporation stop just off the main- typically no curb box installed---the review guy wants a 2" curb box shutoff installed- ok that is no problem, a bit not normal but ok.

now we get to the 4" service

a typical 4" service is done one of 2 ways a 3way t (main/main/4" and a gate valve installed after the 3way t OR more typically(for us) a 4" mueller h615 tapping sleeve and gate valve setup.

this guy wants...a 4" SADDLE connection with a 4 inch corporation stop AND a 4" curb box shutoff@the sidewalk just one problem...those things do not exist .

meuller makes a saddle for the size main, but the tap cuts off at......2 inches.
ford...2"
etc

so now we get to tell our client that the reviewer has no clue wtf he is talking about , then ask the reviewer which he wants the mueller h615(or equiv)(which would not require the shutoff of the water main) or the 3 way T...(which WOULD require the shutoff of the water main (for about an hr)- since they would have to cut the water main to install the t connector.)
 
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Lenardo

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finally after ~15 or so years of the boss asking and then us completely forgetting about it due to being busy, i got my application in to take the PLS(professional land surveyor) test. main issue i had was references..need 3 -ACTIVE- PLS's (and a few others) to qualify for the test. (funny thing is, i have worked with more Professional civil engineers- but they do not count for the "main" references needed)- i've worked with over the years 8 or 9 PE's.

for the past 30 years i've worked with -daily- with 2- PLS's and didn't really have any interaction with any others......got the 3rd though, then i mailed it all in and the 3rd guy hadn't sent in the reference form...he finally did that and in the next week or so i should find out of my application was accepted to take the test... once i find that out, gonna take the practice test online to see how i do without reviewing anything/studying.
 

Lenardo

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pls shouldn't be that hard, my coworker passed it~15 yrs ago or so on his first try... just have to brush up on my legal aspects since MA is differrent than most of the country since we have a Land Court division -and by law land court plans have to be correct(even if they aren't) we just had a survey in boston surrounded by 4 different land court cases.....for the MOST part, the plans match Exactly...yet...... in the rear there is a -for land court- massive discrepency for the common line between 3 of the plans (over a foot difference)- for us we don't care since it is not on locus- our lot is unregistered land- and behind our lot by ~150 feet, but use record land court math, we got 3 different solutions for the same line....it all depended on which plan was used. (this is bad due to the land guaranteed by law- most land court land was land granted to person's by the king of england back in the day.)
 

Lenardo

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finally heard from the board of registration, i have a interview august 8th for the next step in the process to take the test.
 
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Jackie Treehorn

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I've worked in surveying / civil engineering since I was a teenager. (mostly surveying.) My dad is a licensed surveyor, and is essentially a civil engineer too, except he's just not licensed for that. I started drafting survey jobs around 15 years old.

Graduated high school, went to college, dropped out. Started working for my dad full time for around 13-14 years, first in the field for a few years, then mostly in the office. I've done some wastewater / parking lot design type stuff on occasion.

My dad is still chugging along in his mid 60's, sold his company to a bigger company in preparation for retirement, and is still working for that company as their sole PLS.

I eventually moved out of state, got a surveying job with a utility as a tech. I was doing a combination of field surveying plus drafting, being your own party chief. I've since moved on to a land rights role, where I deal with agencies, negotiate new licenses and laydown yards, acquire permits, deal with land owners as a liaison between engineers, etc. It's a stable, union job with a huge company. My base pay is $110k, raises are twice yearly, total compensation is probably around $125k. Not bad for dropping out of college and having no degree. The caveat is I live in one of the most expensive areas of the country and even as a single guy, while I'm comfortable, I'm not living it up. Still, not complaining.


I've got all the books and pre-requisite experience and PLSs to vouch for me to take the national and state exams. I don't at all have to have a PLS (or simply LS as they call them here,) to do my current job, but it's a nice benefit to have, and a nice fallback. I need to buckle down and study for it and take it some day.
 

Jackie Treehorn

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Congrats. How is the PLS difficulty wise? The online practice exams from the same people that put on the PE test were too good and not that expensive. Still, i've known some people to fail it repeatedly.

I've known lots of people over the years who have taken it and passed. Some of these people, if you were to meet them, there's no way you'd think they're at all intelligent, and they can pass it. Surveying attracts some real redneck types, at least where I came from, and you think to yourself "How did this Gomer Pyle motherfucker actually pass a test involving math and logic?"

From what I see and what I'm told, since the tests do change every time, some testing sessions are just gonna be trickier than others. They love making the questions have multiple similar answers and so forth, and other tricky ways of wording things.

I have two coworkers who just took it (state exam,) one failed for his fourth time, the other passed on his second time. The guy who failed it his fourth time is extraordinarily smart and is a really seasoned surveyor. He just keeps barely missing it I think.
 

Lenardo

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had the interview, did ok, was nervous and when nervous i tend to talk. plus they asked technical questions and i am not good at general technical answers, show me the problem, i can do the solution/answer in a few minutes EASY, explaining it, not so much.
find out in a few weeks if i can take the test.

i know junior/senior rights very well, i can rotate/adjust angles, etc like a boss...

hell the answer i gave for the "how to you adjust closed traverses" was good, but in the past 10 years i rarely actually have Adjusted a traverse. total stations have gotten so precise, that in General our closed traverses are 2x or more precise than the minimum angular error of precision required by Land Court of MA.

1 in 15000 is the "minimum" level of precision allowed by land court - last 2 traverses that i have run the closure for,,, one was 1 in 27000 and the other was 1 in 40000...why bother adjusting something, when the adjustment won't actually move anything more than a hundredth of a foot
 

Lenardo

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update #1 since the interview...

the board of registration has approved my application and have recommended that i take the pls test. i should hear in a day or two from the testing firm about dates and fees,,,of course i go on vacation at 5pm today for a week...

on hearing that i can take the test, i got a 12k a year raise(i still make less than the wife -she is a veterinarian) - just for getting to take the test- if i pass the test i'll be getting another raise - to around 125k.