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silverfox762 t1_j7d4crh wrote

Reply to comment by duncan345 in Lead Plates and Land Claims in North America and Europe: When did the practice begin of burying lead plates to establish ownership of land, and why did it die out, and was it ever used successfully in a court of law to establish ownership? by whyenn

In the 1980s in California I put a lot of 2' lengths of rebar in property corners for new subdivisions and property line disputes in the SF Bay Area. I've seen everything in old surveys from old axles to even a giant pipe wrench once.

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Magnergy t1_j7dwfj7 wrote

Did anyone ever come over while you were surveying and offer you a bribe to move the line a bit for them?

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silverfox762 t1_j7enih7 wrote

Nope. We were a civil engineering firm, paid well, above board, and everything was plotted by and on instruments based on county records.

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PorkRindSalad t1_j7ee9q0 wrote

I wonder what keeps people from just hammering their own rebar down and claiming that's where the line is. Wouldn't even have to remove the first one, just create enough confusion to get away with adjusting the new fence line.

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silverfox762 t1_j7enn8z wrote

Doesn't work because every property corner was based on county documents and surveys or plots from established benchmarks. For instance "corner 1 is x.xxx distance at xxx.xx.xx degrees, minutes and seconds from county benchmark 17B located in the middle of y road, x.xxx distance from the northeast corner of y road and z street". Benchmark could be a nail through a washer in the asphalt, a bronze disc set in concrete, and so on. With proper instrumentation and trained surveyors, you get the point down to 1/100 of a foot (yeah, tenths of a foot and tenths of a tenth)

Edit: and we always used county or state benchmarks and NEVER used PG&E benchmarks because for some reason most of them were in the wrong place.

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Rough_Idle t1_j7j4ju9 wrote

Yeah, utility companies are pretty terrible about starting points and property corners. What's with that? I was doing title searches in a small town and by the time I was done, the county gave me a month of free deed copies in exchange for my legal descriptions. Because they were accurate compared to the railroad and electric company markers. For the the square mile around the town square. That next year the tax assessor's database was correct for the first time in a century

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mpinnegar t1_j7fd2wq wrote

What are PG&E benchmarks?

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halibfrisk t1_j7fekt7 wrote

PG&E is a utility company in Northern California(pacific gas and electric)

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silverfox762 t1_j7gka61 wrote

An entire benchmark system by Pacific Gas and Electric. Some are just recorded using county benchmarks with PG&E surveys (which would often get you way off where they were supposed to be) or benchmarks put in by PG&E survey crews, which were just as likely to be in the wrong place according to county planning maps.

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Bonezone420 t1_j7ehpav wrote

Well, for a start, you'd have to be stupid to tell anyone you did it. So, just theoretically speaking, if anyone did this - you simply might not know because they didn't get caught.

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B_P_G t1_j7eoqhy wrote

For newer developments there's usually a plat map that gives dimensions along the edges of the lot. I think they store those at city hall somewhere. So one stake being out of place or lost wouldn't be a huge problem. And for larger plots all the states not on the east coast follow a fairly standard system. So if your land boundary is on the range line or town line or some quarter section line then that's a known thing and stake position isn't going to matter as much.

With that said, what really matters is whether it's the kind of thing that's worth going to court over or bringing in a surveyor. But even if it isn't right now it could still be a problem in the future. Stuff does get errantly built outside the bounds of peoples' property and that's a legal mess when somebody discovers it.

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outtathesky_fellapie t1_j7eowgr wrote

As another said, every marker has references (other markers) that include exact distances and descriptions. It would be trivial to figure out that someone was lying

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FoolInTheDesert t1_j7fred3 wrote

It's common in older cities. For example in Arizona, in cities like Bisbee and Tombstone, you can find multiple section corners and property corners set in close proximity to each other by different surveyors. In one case I know of 6 different pins meant to be the same point all spread out over an 8sqft area. How do you resolve this? Well a surveyor has to dig through records and try to figure out which point to hold, OR in many cases you might have to go testify in court for it to get settled because property owners will sue each other. In many cases we had to spend a day collecting control data and then had to calculate the correct pin location and set our own more accurate pin with our survey data on it. It can get complicated!

Surveyor errors are actually common and have led to many a state/national border or property line dispute and ongoing design, infrastructure layout issues, etc. to this day all over the country!

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duncan345 t1_j7jjg0k wrote

In my experience you deal with this by doing a thorough title search and getting an ALTA survey, which would show the existence of several conflicting landmarks. Hopefully you can then get a boundary line agreement with the adjoining land owners. Usually the neighbors are fine with accepting whatever they perceived the boundary line to be. Then you record the boundary agreement in your county land records so that future title searchers know the problem has been cleared up.

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