What a site survey covers, and the point at which it stops

The three passes of a day on site

A survey of a coastal property is walked three times, and the three walks answer different questions. Running them together saves an hour and costs the record its structure, so they are kept apart even on a small frontage.

1. The approach: the frontage paced, the observation points set out and numbered, the access to each one established and written down.
2. The faces: each element read in the order it is reached, described in a sentence, graded, and photographed against its own number.
3. The returns: the points that were under water, in shadow or out of reach on the first pass, taken again at a different hour or a different tide.

The head sheet is filled in before the first pass and not after it. Date, hour, tide state, wind and weather, and the name of the instrument used are facts about the day, and a day written up from memory in the evening is a day with its figures rounded.

What a pass actually reaches

Reach is the whole question on a shoreline. A face three metres up a sea wall is read one way from a ladder and another way from the beach with a hand level, and the two readings are not interchangeable. The survey therefore records the means of access against every observation, in the same line as the finding.

Where a face is read from a distance, the record states the distance and the instrument. Where it is read by hand, it says so. Where a part of the element is concealed by a structure, by vegetation or by standing water, the record describes what is visible and names what would have to move for the rest to be seen.

That line is not an administrative detail. It is the difference between a report that can be relied on by somebody who was not there and a report that merely sounds confident.

The point at which the survey stops

A survey stops at the limit of what was reached on the stated day, and the written record stops at the same place. Everything beyond that limit is described as what it is: a thing that would need a different access, a different tide or a different season to read.

A specification can still be written against a survey that stopped early, provided the specification says which of its instructions rest on an observation and which rest on an inference drawn from one. Those two are printed differently so that a contractor pricing the work can see at a glance which items may change once the fabric is opened up.

Enquiries about a survey of a particular property are answered in writing at enquiries@aquavail.work, and the first answer is usually a question about access.