I was fortunate to attend the Geomatics Engineering Conference in Fresno on January 27, 2005.   The drive from Orange County to Fresno took place on a mid winter day.  I plotted out my trip via Yahoo Maps which told me to take Interstate 5.  While in the vicinity of the Grapevine, I decided that California Route 99 was my choice and at Bakersfield, merged onto 99 North to Fresno.  Part of the allure of 99 is the proximity to the railroad which used to be known as the Southern Pacific.  A number of years after the merger into Union Pacific, I spotted an intact, non patched, Southern Pacific locomotive.  I did spot one Burlington Northern Santa Fe train on the UP just above Bakersfield.  Ariving in Fresno in mid afternoon, the hotel was easily located with the conference hotel nearby.

The early bird talk at the conference centered around "To Find a Corner."  We only caught the last hour and the speaker utilized a notes sheet with many court decisions.

The Northern Calfiornia Section of ACSM held an annual dinner with a speaker from the California State Railroad Museum.. He showed a few slides of the museum and spoke mainly about implements used to construct the railroad such as 22 cubic foot capacity carts.  The transcontinental railroad over the Sierra Nevada Mountains was expensive to build and very hard to maintain.  Drilling tunnels through Sierra Nevada granite yielded some 7 to 9 inches per day.  Some examples of improvement work on the railroad included filling earth around trestle bridges.  Keeping the railroad open over Donner Pass was done by the use of snowsheds which occasionally caught fire.  The railroad had a fire spotting tower overlooking many miles of snowsheds.  With the advent of better snow clearing maintenance of way equipment, notably spreaders and rotary snow plows, and the Sierra views from Reno to Sacramento being marketable to tourists and immigrants, most of the sheds were removed.  Up on Donner Pass one railroad removed a second track from service with the right of way still intact.  I have been to the California Railroad Mmuseum and it would be nice to have a surveying conference there.  After the  speaker was over, I drove around Fresno for a few minutes to get my bearings.  I found Blackstone, the main north south thoroughfare.  Olive, an east west street, had a very nice "Tower Theater" with name bands on the marquee.  The city has a nice downtown area in the vicinity of the Amtrak Station.  City Hall is across the street in a very modern structure.  A rainstorm was approaching Fresno and hit just as I returned to the hotel.

The conference was held at the Radisson Hoteland Conference Center on Ventura Street next to an exposition arena.  This hotel has an atrium type of arrangement, which was good on this rainy weekend.

Arriving after the Saturday morning welcome speech, Tony Grissim, Major Account Manager for Leica Geosystems HDS, spoke about the future of surveying with the arrival of the scanner.  His talking points included terrestrial IGAR, the market and the workload.  Scanners have been on market  for a while.  Leica bought Cyrax IMaging, and how offers the rebranded Cyrax 2500 in addition to two new scanners, the HDS 3000, and HDS 4000.  The HDS 300 machine was demonstrated last fall at John Wayne Aiport for the County of Orange.  It is impressive and powerful.  It captures millions of data points in a day compared to under one thousand via traditional survey methods.  The scanner comes equiped with a digital camera and can also do its own control work to bridge setups.  More detailed scans are done where your control is located.  The 3 dimensional aspect of the mass quantity of points is stunning.  You better have lots of hard drive space and battery for your laptop when collecting.  Tony gave some examples of scale of economy for firms employing the HDS.  Some companies have had over 50 jobs done with HDS.  One memorable job done by HDS involved collecting buildings at a university.  To employ this instrument, you still must do preplanning, site visitation, site control, and sometimes use traditional surveying to add information.  Options to HDS include WiFi.   HDS can give intense detail of objects like bolts.  Tony spoke of deliverables from HDS.  Filters are available editing out noise like automobiles from a street being mapped.  While HDS is usable at night from your HDS outfitted vehicle, the weather still can be a limiting factor.

The morning keynote speaker was Don Liddle, a photogrammistrist at the NASA Johnson Space Center.  His work supports manned space flight activities.  This presentation dealt with the final flight of space shuttle Columbia in February 2003.  He spoke of the need for foam to surround portions of a space vehicle from certain elements before and at takeoff.  Interestingly, out of 70 camera views at Cape Canaveral, one potentially useful camera had been out of service at the time of Columbia's last launch.  Data which was available, showed something striking one wing of Columbia.  They thought it hit on the underside of the wing.  They were able to take different images and cancel out data to "see" impact against the shuttle.  NASA knew that there was some problem,  and after many days of intense scrutiny, the decision was made to reenter Columbia with catastrophic results.  Many photographers and amateur astronomers capture darkness reentries of space vehicles.  Columbia images from its last reentry are striking in that Mr. Liddles work time lined amateur video and still photographs.  At the end of the presentation, we viewed animation of images from various locations of Columbia's descent and disintegration over the Western United States.  Luckily, none of the debris landed in any metropolitan areas of Texas.  As much as I love those trains, this was one of the most captivating presentations of the conference.

Next on the agenda was a half hour break for socializing and checking out the equipment exhibits in an adjacent room.  The rest of the morning session was broken up into 2 different rooms with 3 presentations each.  I hit part of Transferring Units and was particularly interested in Copper Mining Surveys with Dave Mulenga, a CSU Fresno Geomatics graduate student and verteran Zambian mining surveyor.  Central Aftica has a multinational area of copper deposition.  While in charge of engineering, surface, and underground survey services, Mr. Mulenga interacted with geologists, mettalurgists, and government mine inspectors.  He showed us many plots and mine interior shots.  He stressed the importance of monitoring ground movements on the surface above the mine.  He discussed moving surveys forward in the absence of the sky.  A mining survey operation employs theodolites, tacheometer, gyroscope, steel and linen tapes, levels, and clino rulers and clinometer.  Challenges are present and pose danger to surveyors from working in confined spaces, exposure to heat and noise (try working at a commercial airport!), extremely wet/humid underground conditions, working in ventilation tunnels and my favorite, climbing chain ladders.  Mr. Malenga's group was fairly meticulous in their surveys and reduction of data.  Imagine building surveying for underground pump chambers, crushers, and electrical substations.  Some of these rooms would be large in size.  Above ground work would include measurement of waste rock dumps, copper concentrates, copper ore piles, and waste dams.  Mr. Mulenga touched on surface subsidence monitoring, including caving lines, and subsidence level lines.  Canals overlying mining areas are of concern as well as inspection of dam walls.