Finally cracked a map I've been staring at for 4 weeks

So I've been digging into a theory about why a certain building complex near my town has no sat photos from before 2005. I kept finding these grid patterns in old local records that just didn't line up. Turns out the county switched coordinate systems that year and nobody updated the public indexes. Took me four weekends of cross-referencing random property deeds to catch it. Has anyone else spent way too long on a detail that just turns out to be a filing error?

2 comments

2 Comments

angelafisher16d ago

Is it really that big a deal though like you said it's just a filing error. Most people wouldn't notice or care about grid patterns in old records from before 2005. Seems like a lot of effort for something that doesn't actually change anything about the building.

the_kai16d ago

Oh come on, I gotta push back on that a little. You're thinking like a regular person, not like someone who's ever had an engineer sign off on a structural load report based on those old grid patterns. If the filing error means the grid is off by, say, 6 inches at the foundation, and then someone goes to hang a new HVAC unit or run new conduit, they could be drilling into a concrete slab that's not where the plans say it is. I've seen it happen with a renovation job where the old blueprints showed a column 2 feet to the left of where it actually was. The contractor ended up cutting into a rebar cage that was holding up a parking deck, cost the owner like 15 grand to fix. So no, it's not "just" a filing error when it comes to physical buildings - those grids are the skeleton of the whole place.