Land Surveyor Blogs

Surveying with Cameras: Enhancing Occupational Safety of Field Crews

While surveying is often enjoyable and rewarding work, the conditions and sites where we do our land surveying work often are full of life-threatening hazards. Maintaining your safety or your field crew’s safety as they work in and along dangerous roads, on busy construction sites or at hazardous industrial facilities is paramount. Using conventional land surveying techniques and tools to ensure the occupational safety of field crews often adds complexity and cost to projects that can be reduced or eliminated entirely by surveying with cameras.

The National Safety Council reported in 2011 that over 100 road construction workers are killed in construction zones each year. About half of those worker fatalities resulted from a motor vehicle striking the worker. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) also reported that deaths in 2010-2011 increased on roads, which made up 14% of the total traffic fatalities in 2011. As bad as those numbers are, this was an increase of 3% over the total traffic fatalities just a year earlier in 2010. Based on those figures and rising fatalities NHTSA predicted that every eight minutes a pedestrian will be injured and another one will die every two hours in traffic crashes!

Being able to remotely measure the locations of points found in hazardous areas using a regular camera is a quantum step forward in worker safety. There are many benefits to using close-range photogrammetry software like DatuGram™3D including improved productivity and better profits, but in my opinion there is no better reason to purchase and use an inexpensive, regular camera and DatuGram™3D than for safety alone.

From my 30-years of experience surveying and from what I’m hearing around the country from Datumate customers, here are a few examples of how land surveyors are using or planning to use a regular camera and DatuGram™3D to work more safely:

• Stockpiles – Stockpiles are inherently unsafe because of their heights and potential for shifting, unstable surfaces. For these reasons the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) does not want surveyors to be walking on stockpiles while performing their daily tasks, like topographic mapping of stockpiles to determine volumes. Being able to survey stockpile surfaces remotely using a regular camera, either elevated on a telescoping pole or with a small UAV, is a very efficient and safe process for your field personnel.
• Trenches – Because of the risk of trench collapse and cave-ins, trenches can be extremely dangerous work zones that are heavily regulated by OSHA, and for good reason. As above with stockpiles, employing a camera to remotely perform as-built surveys of shallow utility installations is quick, accurate and completely eliminates risk because your workers need not enter into these potentially dangerous trenches.
• Pipeline as-builts – Whether in trenches or elevated above ground, there are dangers and OSHA limitations to surveyors walking on pipelines. Using a camera elevated over a pipeline a surveyor can safely, quickly and accurately as-built the pipeline welded seams, for example.
• Roadways and high-traffic areas – This is probably one of the biggest risk zones for surveyors on a daily basis. Having done a lot of surveying along and in roads and intersections, I can personally attest to just how dangerous working in and along roadways and high-traffic areas can be, having nearly been hit by automobiles on many occasions. Datumate has many use cases for surveying and mapping roadways and street intersections using a regular camera that completely eliminate the need to enter into these hazardous areas.
• Hazardous electrical facilities – I was just working with a surveyor last week who was using a regular camera and DatuGram™3D to survey and map an electrical substation without needing to enter the electrical facility at all. I distinctly remember my first party chief warning us against using a steel tape to measure the chain link fence around a small electrical utility installation adjacent to a building we were surveying because he knew of a surveyor that was electrocuted and died doing similar work. Apparently, the electricity arced to the nearby surrounding fence and when the surveyor’s steel tape touched the surrounding metal fence he was killed.
• Hazardous industrial facilities – Industrial facilities are inherently dangerous places to survey due to their complex installations and oftentimes exposed, moving mechanical systems. It is clearly safer to use remote measurement techniques with a camera than to measure those same facilities directly.

Additionally, because these are often complex sites, having the ability to easily measure new points in DatuGram™3D with the images you took in the field eliminates the need to re-enter a hazardous industrial facility to locate missing survey data using conventional methods.

Hazardous material sites – I’ve had several surveyors ask me to show them DatuGram™3D and how to survey using a regular camera specifically so that they can avoid entering contaminated hazardous material sites. First, they want to avoid entering and working in these highly toxic waste sites and, second, they are equally excited about not having to suit-up with bulky and inconvenient personal protective equipment!

The examples above are just a few cases showing where close-range photogrammetry using a regular camera and software like DatuGram™3D will improve the occupational safety of your workers. Using this new revolution of surveying with regular camera more than pays for itself for just one dangerous job site, compared to the cost of even one small injury, or worse, if there is an employee fatality.

Please contact me to request an online demo or to learn more about how using a regular camera and DatuGram™3D can make your work safer.

-- Note: This article was written for the Datumate October 2014 Newsletter.

About Eric Colburn, PLS

Eric Colburn, PLS, is a seasoned professional land surveyor, DatuGram™3D and AutoCAD Civil 3D consultant with over thirty years of experience. Eric is a successful entrepreneur, industry writer, product development consultant, RI licensed professional land surveyor, president of Foster Survey Company founded in 1993, publisher of EricColburn.com since 2008 and president of Colburn Strategic Partners, Inc. since 2013.

A technology and productivity evangelist, Eric often explores innovative tools and technologies to improve the productivity and profits of land surveyors and civil engineering professionals.