Prefeasibility Access Road Design-Revised
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the record would indicate. With little information to tie the roadways to the Public
Land Survey System, there was some difficulty getting the existing roads to match
the platted roads. The existing roadway was used to make a best fit to the platted
roads and the assumption has been made that all of the roads were meant to be 66
feet wide. This assumption for the Right-of-Way width has been used to calculate
the impacts of the project and is not intended to be a legal survey of boundary.
These assumptions were based on having performed many county road projects
over the years and using resources from the survey community, governmental
agencies and academia. One of the most useful resources comes from the University
of Wyoming Technology Transfer Center. It is a report entitled “Legal Establishment
of County Roads in Wyoming”. The report contains relevant statutes and court case
files about the establishment and use of county roads and state highways. Another
is the county officials that were contacted and asked what opinions they had on the
roadways in question. All of these items were brought together to make the decision
to initially utilize a right-of-way width of 66 feet to define the impacts.
V
SURVEY DATA
Rare Element Resources (RER) provided data from a flight performed by FUGRO for
use as a surface model of the existing terrain in the Bearlodge project location. Most
of the two roadway options were covered by this area. FUGRO was able to provide
additional data from the flight that they had not initially provided to RER.
HDR|Stetson Engineering put a field crew on site to verify the accuracy of the flight
data and to pick up survey data in the locations that were not included in the flight.
Landowners in the project area were not willing to allow the survey crew access to
private property to obtain survey data outside of the existing right of way.
In order to compare the FUGRO data to the survey data gathered by HDR|Stetson
Engineering, three points from a previous survey were used. The three points were
surveyed in 2011 by Bearlodge Limited Inc. Consulting Engineers & Land Surveys.
Using these three points, the FUGRO surface was scaled from state plane
coordinates to ground coordinates. This made it possible to check the elevations
using the same vertical datum. Accurate comparisons could be made by using spot
elevations generated from the surface and placing those on the surveyed point. A
single scale factor was used for bringing our survey information to the ground by
picking a central elevation within the project area and then setting all of the
surveyed data to that level. The same scale factor was then used to manipulate the
FUGRO data to make a best fit between the two sources of data and create a data
set that would fit the criteria for this portion of the design process.
As the spot elevations were introduced with the surveyed points it became apparent
that the differences were going to be within the standard margin of error from aerial
