Jefferson County homeowner claims incorrect survey caused home to flood

As posted in the Beaumont Enterprise, February 05, 2009
By KYLE PEVETO
February, 5, 2009

James Majors' Hillebrandt Acres cabin would not have flooded if surveyors who established his property's elevation had done their homework, the homeowner said.

Majors, 43, of Port Neches, will present a complaint against Soutex Surveyors, Inc. of Port Arthur to the Texas Board of Professional Land Surveying for issuing an incorrect elevation certificate for his home on Hillebrandt Bayou in 2003.

The surveyors acted in good faith, the company president said, but the error may be rooted in a natural phenomenon discovered last year.

"I want someone to hold up to their objectives, to say, 'I made a mistake'," Majors said by phone Thursday.

In 1996, Majors hired Soutex to complete a property survey for his cabin in the Hillebrandt Acres subdivision near the LaBelle area in unincorporated Jefferson County. Before building a cabin on the property along Hillebrandt Bayou, he wanted to find the property's elevation above sea level so he could research the historical floods that hit the area and build above that point.

The survey placed his yard at 10 feet above mean sea level, according to his complaint, and in 2003, he began building almost 3 feet higher than that to rise above the historical flood level in the area.

In July 2003, Soutex created Majors a final elevation certificate he could file with Jefferson County to receive final permits, placing his home's bottom floor at 12.9 feet.

At that level, the Hurricane Ike storm surge should have hit more than a foot below the cabin's bottom floor.

Majors contacted Soutex to ask about the discrepancy, and the survey company's president, Anthony Leger, told him about other homes in the Country Road Estates area across Hillebrandt Bayou that had similar problems.

Dozens of homes in the LaBelle area were lower than their elevation certificates said, and after the storm, many were too low to get building permits from Jefferson County, because they were below the 100-year flood plain. Majors' home was above the 100-year level. Still, the storm surge pushed more than a foot of water into his house.

For 30 years, property elevation in the area of Country Road Estates and other homes in the LaBelle area had been produced using data from a federal monument - a brass disk - placed a little more than two miles northwest of Port Acres, Leger wrote in a letter to Jefferson County in May 2008.

That monument, placed by the National Geodetic Survey in 1954, placed the monument's elevation at 6.32 feet above sea level, Ronnie Taylor of the National Geodetic Survey told The Enterprise in late December.

Federal surveyors checked the area again in the early 1980s for FEMA flood maps, and the benchmark's elevation was 3.1 feet lower.

Professional surveyors cannot take the time to establish mean sea level each time they shoot a survey, Leger said, so they rely on government data from the hundreds of thousands of benchmarks across the country. The benchmark's level remained too high in the government record.

Leger said the benchmark's level could account for incorrect elevations throughout LaBelle. When he learned of the problem in spring 2008, he wrote a letter to the county.

The benchmark's elevation change may be caused by subsidence - the sinking of soil often caused by oil drilling or groundwater pumping in an area. A 1983 FEMA flood study said in the area where the benchmark lay, "the subsidence is about 3 feet."

Majors said the surveyors should have known about the benchmark's elevation change and should have not have used data from the benchmark that changed.

"I did my homework (while building the house)," Majors said. "Why didn't they do theirs?"

Surveyors rely on published data from the monuments, Leger said, unless the benchmarks prove incorrect.

"It's a normal practice, yes, sir," Leger said. "It's just unfortunate that LaBelle is in that situation."

The surveying board will meet at 9 a.m. in Austin and may issue its findings at a later meeting. The board can revoke or suspend surveyors' licenses.

California budget woes whipsaw highway contractors

Posted in the Sacramento Bee
By Jim Wasserman and Jon Ortiz
jwasserman@sacbee.com
Published: Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2008 | Page 9A


Excuse some mood swings in the construction industry.

On a good day, President-elect Barack Obama says he will spend untold billions of dollars on infrastructure work to wake up the U.S. economy.

Then, on a bad one, California officials say they'll cancel $5 billion worth of infrastructure projects in two weeks unless there's a fast budget fix.

"One week we're getting fantastic news and this week you wake up and it's complicated. Is it a roller coaster? Absolutely," said Diane Meehan, owner and president of Sacramento's Richard A. Heaps Electrical Contractor Inc. The company works on highway traffic lights from Merced to Oregon.

"There are a couple of things pulling against one another," said Steven Hiatt, Sacramento office director for the engineering firm Nolte Associates Inc. The firm's 500 employees operate in three states and Mexico. "The (federal) economic stimulus package tends to weigh toward some quick projects that may take place next year. But the state's budget problem tends to counter that. How that works out remains to be seen."

This can, indeed, seem like the best and worst of times for an embattled construction industry competing for fewer projects with ever-lower bids. Yet many area construction executives who work throughout California and the West say they're largely looking past the state's budget problems to a coming boom.

If the explosion of work comes "it's going to be huge for firms in the Sacramento area," said Meehan, who has 65 employees.

Collectively, Meehan, Hiatt and many others are watching as an incoming presidential administration considers massive deficit spending to rebuild the nation's bridges, highways, tunnels and schools.

Days ago, Obama promised to create millions of jobs with the "single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s." He also promised to create new jobs by upgrading schools and making buildings more energy-efficient.

Obama said that such action is necessary – and soon – to offset the loss of 2 million jobs in this recession. In California, the construction industry alone has lost 66,100 jobs in the past year – mostly in the home-building sector.

Ken Kayser, president of Sacramento-based Teichert Construction, said, "It's huge. With the private side all dried up, it really is the only game there is for companies like ours."

Teichert specializes in paving, grading and widening roads and highways from Bakersfield to Marysville. While much of its work was for housing developers during the boom, the collapse of the Central Valley housing market has heightened its need for public infrastructure jobs. The firm has about 3,000 workers.

Sacramento-based highway contractor C.C. Myers said Tuesday that building infrastructure to stimulate the economy "is good for everybody. Other people make and supply the things we need. It puts them to work, too."

But consider this, too, he said. "We need it done. We're way behind the curve in where we should be on maintaining our highways. One of the reasons it doesn't get done is because we haven't had the money for years. This infusion will help."

Myers, like Kayser, is waiting to see a game plan from the California Department of Transportation. Caltrans has outlined plans to spend $107 billion on transportation projects in the next decade.

Department spokeswoman Tamie McGowen said those plans contain the likeliest candidates for construction under a federal stimulus. For big contractors like Myers, that's a shot at projects like 550 miles of new high-occupancy vehicle lanes and 750 miles of new highway lanes.

Myers said his firm largely depends on public sector work, such as rebuilding a damaged Bay Area freeway interchange and overhauling a section of Interstate 5 last summer in Sacramento. His firm is currently building what Myers calls "the longest arch bridge in the U.S." on Highway 395 near Carson City, Nev. He employs 450 to 500 people.

While heavy construction firms await stimulus moves by the federal government, the state is proving – at least momentarily – more worrisome. Monday, state Treasurer Bill Lockyer warned the Legislature that cash is running so short that $5 billion in public works projects are threatened with a halt within two weeks.

He said that could force thousands of layoffs.

"Our ability to give our struggling economy a much-needed shot in the arm will be lost," Lockyer said.

Paul Meyer, executive director of the American Council of Engineering Companies of California, said it's critical that California "get its act together in time" to provide matching funds for the federal stimulus. The Sacramento organization represents 1,100 private consulting, engineering and land-surveying firms in California.

"If California doesn't have the funds available to match, it could delay projects, at a minimum. We could miss out on some," he said. "It's a competitive situation between the states."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Call The Bee's Jim Wasserman, (916) 321-1102. Read his blog on real estate, Home Front, at www.sacbee.com/blogs.

California Surveyor Paul Cuomo Passes

Written by Tony Cuomo (as posted in American Surveyor Magazine Online)

Paul Cuomo, PLS, of Newport Beach, California, founder of Pacific Land Seminars and owner of Paul Cuomo Press, Inc., passed away on December 2, 2008. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumor in August 2008. He passed peacefully with his family by his side. Paul began his surveying career in 1958 with the California Division of Highways (Cal Trans). He became a licensed Land Surveyor in 1973 and that year started teaching boundary classes at Santa Ana Junior College. He left Caltrans in 1980 and joined the Orange County Surveyor's Office as Deputy County Surveyor. In 1985, Paul founded Pacific Land Seminars and began offering exam preparation workshops for the California Land Surveyor in Training (L.S.I.T.) and Professional Land Surveyor (P.L.S.) exams. He "retired" in 1993 to become a consultant in the boundary and mapping fields, and to focus more on surveying education. Paul was a founder and past chairman of the California Foundation for Land Surveying Education. He was a major supporter Cal Poly Pomona's efforts to obtain ABET accreditation for their 4-year Surveying option program. As a result of the Foundations efforts, over $100,000 in scholarships have been awarded to surveying students at Cal Poly Pomona and Cal State Fresno. In addition to scholarship funding, the foundation also provided over $50,000 in equipment donations to the Fresno, Pomona, Santiago Canyon Community College, and San Jacinto Community College surveying programs. Along with Michael Pallamary and the late Roy Minnick, he co-authored "Advanced Land Descriptions", and authored "Surveying Principles for Civil Engineers" as well as the yet to be published "Elements of Boundary Control." He has been an Expert Examiner for the State Board of Registration, held the office of president at both the local and state level for the California Land Surveyors Association, and, through Pacific Land Seminars, has presented classes, seminars, and workshops across the United States.

Paul was born on March 23, 1937, in Brooklyn, New York. He was a devoted husband and doting father. He is survived by his wife of nearly fifty years, Peggy, by his two sons, Tom and Tony, their wives Janessa and Rachelle, and his four grandchildren, Julian, Elena, Zoe, and Cole. In his youth, Paul was a devoted Brooklyn Dodger fan. In the late fifties, he followed the team to Los Angeles, California. In spite of his team's defection, Paul loved to travel back to his native New York to take in the theater in Manhattan, and visit family & friends. He was an avid pool player where his skills earned him the moniker 'Paulie Fats' Paul played a wicked and deadly game of 9-ball. He loved music of all types and had a wonderful singing voice.

As an educator and mentor over the past four decades, Paul's passion and devotion to the advancement of surveying education has touched thousands of lives and careers. Based on his extraordinary commitment to Land Surveying education, two separate memorial funds have been set up, one through his local Orange County, California, chapter of the California Land Surveyors Association, and the second through California State University at Fresno. Donations can be made payable to either the "Paul Cuomo Memorial Scholarship Fund" (the C.L.S.A. Orange County Chapter fund) or the "Paul Cuomo Memorial Educational Fund" (the Cal State Fresno fund), and forwarded to Pacific Land Seminars, 2832 Tigertail Dr., Rossmoor, CA., 90720.

A memorial celebration is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, January 17th. Please contact tony@pacificland.com, rachelle@pacificland.com, or visit www.paulcuomo.com for details as they become available.

Fresno State student, group honored by the U.N. and State Department

The United Nations, U.S. State Department and a West Virginia manufacturer of instruments to detect landmines have honored Fresno State senior David Biswanger and an engineering student group for raising money to help remove landmines, the manufacturer has announced.

Biswanger is president of the student chapter of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping at California State University, Fresno, which worked with the Civil & Geomatics Engineering Department at the university and several other groups on the project.

They collected more than 400 cell phones for recycling and raised more than $1,029 to buy a de-mining tool from Schonstedt Instrument Co., which also makes devices used to detect cluster bombs and other unexploded ordnance.

The magnetic locator purchased through the fundraising -- and a matching tool donated by Schonstedt -- were sent to Nepal, according to the company.

Biswanger, 40, of Carmel Valley is a geomatics engineering major.

"It's nice to be honored, especially by the United Nations and State Department," he said. "It was really nice getting a letter from both those entities."


Posted in The Fresno Bee 10/29/08 23:41:17
http://www.fresnobee.com/local/story/974480.html

2009 Officer Nominations

At the August Chapter meeting, the nominations for 2009 Chapter Officers were finalized. The nominees are:

President:
- Kevin Nehring (Incumbent)

Vice President:
- Bob Greene (Incumbent)
- Brad Luken (2008 Secretary)

Secretary:
- Augustine Ramirez

Treasurer:
- Kevin Nehring (Incumbent)
- James Temple (2008 Past President)

Chapter Representative:
- Ted Kerber was elected last year to a two year term.

Ballots will be mailed to the general membership and others on the Chapter mailing list early next week. The votes for nominees, along with write-in votes, will be counted at the Chapter meeting on September 11, 2008. The officers will be installed at the Chapter meeting on November 13, 2008.

Call for Nominations

During the July Chapter meeting of the San Joaquin Valley Chapter of the California Land Surveyor's Association, a call was made for nominations for new Chapter Officers for 2009.

Board positions are as follows: President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer. Duties can be found in the Article 7 of the Chapter Bylaws.

Final nominations will take place at the August Chapter meeting, and ballots will be mailed out soon after. Ballots will be tallied at the September meeting.

If you would like to nominate someone for a position, or volunteer yourself, please contact the Chapter President, Kevin Nehring, at SJVCLSA@gmail.com or by phone at 559-297-4200 x8.

Trimble buys Seco Manufacturing

REDDING
July 30, 2008 8:29am

• Second acquisition of an engineering and construction accessories company

• "Seco will enable us to continue to augment our existing product lines"

Privately-held Seco Manufacturing Company Inc. of Redding has been acquired in an all-cash transaction by Trimble Navigation Limited (NASDAQ: TRMB) of Sunnyvale.

Seco makes accessories for the geomatics, surveying, mapping, and construction industries.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Trimble recently acquired of Crain Enterprises, which was announced in January. The purchase of Seco and Crain allows Trimble to provide the necessary accessories that can be offered as part of its positioning products used in the engineering and construction markets, it says.

Seco specializes in the development, fabrication and machining of metallic accessory products while Crain is more focused on polymer and composite-based products.

"Seco will enable us to continue to augment our existing product lines by offering additional accessories as part of our solutions portfolio,” says Bryn Fosburgh, sector vice president of Trimble. “The acquisition allows us to better satisfy our user's needs."
_____
Posted in the Central Valley Business Times July 30, 2008
http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?ID=9440
_____

Read Trimble's News Release HERE.
_____

Land surveyor becomes one of world’s oldest PhD recipients

Colonel Michael Cobb, an RICS member since 1949, has become the oldest recipient of a PhD from Cambridge University at the age of 91.

Over 40 family members joined Col Cobb at the ceremony in July, some coming from as far as Texas and Canada.

Col Cobb received his doctorate for creating The Railways of Great Britain: A Historical Atlas, taking 18 years to complete and a total of 25 years before it was published.

Dr Richard Smith, Head of Cambridge's Geography Department and one of Michael's PhD examiners, said the atlas is a remarkable piece of scholarship.

"It is a definitive record. It is not just of interest to the enthusiast but a vital tool for anyone seriously interested in the economic geography and history of Great Britain. There is nothing like it."

Originally from Devon, Col Cobb saw action in Dunkirk, north Africa and Italy.

After the end of the war in 1945, Michael began surveying for the Army, commanding survey regiments in Egypt and other places.

He retired from the Army in 1965 and worked in mapping until his retirement in 1971.
__________
Photograph courtesy of Guann-Yeu Chin
Posted on the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors on 24 July 2008
http://www.rics.org/Networks/Faculties/Geomatics/oldestphd_f_230808.htm