Guy Murdoch
SURVEY | LOUISVILLE, KY
Guy Murdoch
Land Survey Manager
I started my land survey career in the field, and that has been a major help as I help manage the field crews and process the data that our crews bring in now. One of the biggest challenges is to ensure that before our survey crews climb into their trucks each morning they have the info they need to collect good survey data. When survey data comes back into the office, I make sure it’s complete, accurate, and usable by the engineers. Even though I’m a professional land surveyor and not an engineer, I try to think like an engineer. That way, I can anticipate what they need to create a design that can be built without surprises.
For example, if we are working on a highway improvement, it would be a terrible thing for our engineers to have designed a new storm drainage system and then during construction discover that there’s a telephone line that conflicts with a proposed storm pipe. When that happens, our engineering teams have to scramble to come up with a new design. That leaves the construction crew cooling its heels, which costs time, effort, and money. We can prevent that by looking ahead to what happens with our product when we pass it along.
I’m particularly proud of my part in the Bridging Kentucky project. We surveyed about 500 bridges in two years – pretty amazing when you think about it. To keep track of the status of those hundreds of bridges, I created a system to keep track of field crews, CAD operators, and outside services (such as 811) as all the components of each bridge survey were completed. In a matter of minutes, I could answer questions about the survey status of each bridge, including details like what utilities were notified of the project by 811 or who the field crew was. If on any given day KYTC needed to know the status of a particular bridge, I always had the answer at my fingertips. Knowing that I helped us survey 500 bridges in an impossible timeframe is a very satisfying feeling.