Fred Schwaderer
After 12 years, Wasilla voters will put a man in charge
SURVEYING: But the work gets you out to see Alaska, offers sense of permanence.
Published: July 17, 2007
Last Modified: July 20, 2007 at 01:16 AM
WASILLA -- Surveyor Fred Schwaderer's grandfather -- freezing in a tent on a Montana railroad realignment project -- ditched that gig for a similar job in Brazil in 1907.
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Fred Schwaderer
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Schwaderer's father surveyed parts of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline and worked on Alaska Native land claims around Kivalina, in addition to many other duties as the state Highway Department's chief construction engineer in the 1960s.
Schwaderer himself had to hang, suspended from a climbing rope, in the Nenana River canyon to pound pitons that would hold equipment necessary for plotting an as-yet unbuilt section of the Parks Highway.
Still think land surveying is boring?
Schwaderer, president of the Mat-Su Valley Chapter of the Alaska Society of Professional Land Surveyors, left field work 12 years ago and now spends his time behind a desk in a basement office at USKH in Wasilla.
His decades of experience span the 1970s, when surveyors lacked even calculators and scribbled readings by hand, to today's computer databases and increasingly widespread application of Global Positioning System technology.
Schwaderer sat down this week to answer questions about just what it is surveyors do. A hint: They take very accurate coordinates used in everything from maps to property boundary disputes to fine-tuning the slope from a parking lot.
But first, he pulled up some photographs on his computer monitor. One showed surveyors and their snowmachines in deep snow, whiteness stretching away. In the next, a snowmachine dangled from a helicopter. Another showed a man in a heavy parka, peering into a theodolite, an older-model surveying instrument.
Q. And people may think surveying is a dull job ...
A. It's not. This is Atka site, about 1975. This, I think, is the pipeline. That's my dad in Whittier. ... You'll notice in a lot of these pictures, there's guns. Bear guns.
Q. So what is that thingie that we see surveyors looking through along the road?
A. That thingie is generally called a total station these days. It measures angles and distances. ... There's cross hairs, and he's looking at a prism. You see that other guy out there with that little stick? That's what they're looking at. And then the other thing you'll see, particularly these days, is what we call GPS rovers. You'll see somebody out with a little stick and an antenna on the top.
Q. Any favorite jobs?
A. Everybody likes to work construction because you get Davis-Bacon wages. (He laughs.) Actually, I preferred doing new routes for roads, just out through the country. We did the Point Mac road, we did the Willow Creek access road. So you're just going out through the woods. Those are the best.
Q. Do you get a sense of accomplishment when the road is finished, knowing the role you played?
A. Oh, certainly. Absolutely. One of the reasons I got into surveying in the first place was because of that. When you set one of these monuments (a metal disc that provides an exact reference point), it's going to be there forever -- until somebody knocks it out -- with your number on it.
(Editor's note: On the other hand, Schwaderer said he worked on the Trunk Road realignment in the 1980s -- and that project still hasn't come to pass. Maybe next year.)
Q. Least favorite jobs?
A. I guess measuring inverts of sanitary sewers.
Q. Does that involve entering a sewer?
A. No, but you have to put your level rod down there and actually dip it in the ... yeah. We used to carry a case of bleach.
Q. How many remote sites have you worked? Ever get weathered in?
A. How many remote sites? Too many to count. That's the good part of surveying, is people pay you to go places that other people have to pay big dollars to go visit. And yes, I have been stuck.
Q. What was the stuckest you got?
A. Oh, let's see. About 10 days in Dutch Harbor.
Q. So your family got used to unpredictable schedules?
A. Yes. My wife (Leslie) is a saint.
Q. Top three talents for someone considering a job as a surveyor?
A. You need to be interested in math ... like to work outdoors and you need to like computers.
Find Zaz Hollander online at adn.com/contact/zhollander or call 257-4200.
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