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October 13, 1999

Jeffrey McManus, BRH Civil Engineers/Land Surveyors

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By SAM BENNETT
Journal Staff reporter

Jeffrey McManus

Jeffrey McManus
McManus
Firm: BRH Civil Engineers/Land Surveyors
Office: 2009 Minor Ave. E.
Year founded: 1969
Staff size: 57
Recent local project: Seattle Aquarium

Q: What does your firm do?

A: BRH is a civil engineering and land surveying firm. The company is about 30 years old. I manage the land surveying division, which is about half of the approximately 60 people in the firm. I manage projects also. We do topographic mapping for designers, ALTA [American Land and Title Association] mapping for attorneys and title companies. We also do construction surveying for general contractors, and we work for municipalities also in topograhic mapping and civil design.

Q: What projects are you most proud of?

A: One of the projects I'm most proud of is developer Roger Belanich's Canyon Park Business Center, a 350-acre commercial plat which has recently been extended another 120 acres. Canyon Park is a project we've been working on since 1983. It started out as a rural setting and we phased in development and provided civil engineering and all the different land surveying tasks. It's included all the phases of surveying that we perform.

Harborview Hospital is interesting in that it's a high liability, underground utility mapping survey with proposed tunneling. This project is an example of the type of high liability survey that we specialize in. We developed Autocad drawings with extensive underground utility layering within these drawings. We actually get involved in the tunneling process when it takes place.

Recently I performed topographic mapping for the Seattle Civic Center, which includes portions of three city blocks. And I'm currently working on the new Seattle Aquarium project. My role is to do extensive mapping of underground utilities and all surface features - virtually anything that appears on the property. I provide an electronic drawing for designers, and Autocad drawing.

Harborview Medical Center
BRH provided land surveying and topographic surveying for Harborview Medical Center.
These kind of areas, like Harborview Hospital and Seattle Civic Center, have very extensive underground utilities, mind boggling complexties of utilities, some that are over 125 years old that designers need to know about to make good decisions to avoid cost overruns and unexpected problems. I call them the ultimate urban survey. It's microsurveying, where you're slicing and dicing and trying to show every bit of information in these different layers in the Autocad system. That's a very challenging goal. When a construction job goes smoothly afterwards then you know you did well.

Seattle Aquarium is a challenging urban survey where there's just a ton of underground utilities, probably only to be exceeded by cities like New York and San Francisco.

It's amazing what is in the streets that look quite simple from the surface - steam lines, water mains, storm sewer systems, sanitary sewer systems, underground power, gas and telephone, and fiberoptic communication lines. Many of these streets actually look like spaghetti when you see what's in them, to a point where a designer has to be very sophisticated about where he's going to get his pipes into the city system. We have to give him that info for him to make a good decision.

Q: What is your business approach?

A: My mission statement for my survey department is client service, of course. We like to operate in the commercial sector and provide one of the higher qualities of work in our industry. We work with clients who appreciate doing the job right and being able to make the right decisions. Quality has always been a trademark of our company. That's a real solid foundation. With this wonderful economy we're in Darrell Nance, my partner in the survey department and I, as well as John Weed and Brent Cummings of the civil engineering department, will continue to forge ahead with client service and product quality. With the support of our CEO, Steve Hitchings, and Ron Goldy, our president, our future looks solid.

Q: Do you feel that the general public understands what a surveyor does?

A: As a surveyor we're always kind of quietly working behind the scenes. But it's always fun to work on a high profile project like the Seattle Aquarium or the Seattle Civic Center. Those are projects that everybody knows about.

The interesting thing about surveying is it has deep historical ties that every surveyor needs to understand. Land ownership is a very emotional issue and it's what gives our country the character it has.

Swedish Hospital
BRH performed a topographic survey for Swedish Hospital.

The way the legal method of land ownership is set up, the original rights to property and the boundary lines that go with that property were established when the land was originally patented into private hands by the U.S. government and most of that took place in the 1800s. So good surveyors many times investigate the original field notes of the original surveyors, and in the Seattle area we're talking about ink quill notes written in longhand as far back as the 1850s. The corners that were set in that era are the prima facie corners to control where the boundary lines are to this very day in a court of law. So surveyors need to learn how to be detectives somewhat and understand how government surveyors operated in the 1800s and where to get the original field notes.

Q: What do you enjoy about your job?

A: I originally loved the challenge - the physical and mental challenge, the technical aspects of it. The challenges can be very difficult. I love to work with people and orchestrate this system of surveying that we use. It involves six or seven people every survey. Most professional land surveyors don't survey out in the field. They have people trained underneath them that run two-man survey crews and we are now running nine two-man survey crews all over, from Oregon to Spokane to the Canadian border.



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