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TIL a huge number of old city sewer maps are just plain wrong.
I was working on a site plan for a small addition in a historic part of town, and the city's online GIS showed a 12-inch main running right under the proposed footing. Something felt off, so I dug into the physical archives at the public works office. The original linen map from 1952 showed the line was actually 8 feet to the east. Turns out, when they digitized a bunch of these in the 90s, a lot of the data entry was rushed and they just placed lines on the grid without checking the old handwritten measurements. I found at least five other spots in that two-block area that were off by more than a foot. This could have been a massive (and expensive) problem if we'd hit it. Has anyone else run into this with municipal records in their area? How do you double-check?
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kevin2185d ago
Oh man, I read a whole article about this exact thing! @dylanh97, it's not just outdated, the digital copies are straight up wrong sometimes.
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Ever think those old maps were just kinda outdated, not totally wrong?
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emery_craig5d ago
That's a good point about them just being old. But what @kevin218 said makes me wonder. If the digital copies are wrong, is it because of a bad scan, or did someone actually change the data? Like, could a modern mistake get locked in as fact?
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