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| Christ Church 2010 Earthquake Result |
To escape once again from the pain of
seeing our country squander its hegemony abroad and misappropriate its leadership at home, I descend into an interesting trivial pursuit. This time I
would like to deal with what I call “jig jags.” This is my term for abrupt
offsets in country roads throughout the United States that were once caused by anomalies
in section lines … which occur throughout the Midwestern and Western United
States. The reason I know about this is that a friend was almost killed many
years ago when, late at night, he missed a jig jag that occurred in his road
and flew off into a corn field.
Let me explain. In the early days of
automobile travel, roads were often laid out along section lines (“sections”
being one-mile square parcels of land ... aggregated into townships ... that were surveyed and memorialized as
this country expanded west.) Here follows a quote from Wikipedia on this
matter:
In many jurisdictions, roads were run
along every section line, giving access to previously remote areas and serving in
many instances as firebreaks. A road or arterial in which the centerline is laid out along a section line boundary is often referred
to as a section line road or section line arterial.
Unfortunately, perfection seldom occurs
in science and surveying and there were many miscues in the process of setting
up sections … see the following (again from Wikipedia … italics are mine):
Due to such factors as survey errors,
poor instrumentation, difficult terrain, and sloppy work by surveyors, and primarily the curvature of the earth,
that is as sections were surveyed from south and east to the north and west the
sections got narrower on the north end, being the reason for the errors
distributed on the north end of the township, the errors on the west included
layout errors also influenced by the compass, or compass based instrument, the
primary tool for obtaining direction. it is common for actual sections to
differ from the PLSS ideal of one square mile. The distortions and errors were,
by design, distributed to the northern and western edges of each township. As a
result the sections in these areas diverge the most from the ideal shape and
size. In addition there was a need to regularly adjust the entire township grid
to account for distortions caused by the curvature of the Earth and the convergence
of meridians toward the poles. In places where the grid was corrected, or where two grids
based on different principal meridians came together, section shapes are often highly warped. Despite
the survey errors and flas [sic], once the grid was established it remained in force
mainly because the monuments of the original survey, when recovered, hold legal
precedent over subsequent resurveys.
So, often the result of the confluence of these two factors,
early country roads often had abrupt jig jags in them … which, I’m certain
cause many auto accidents like my friend's. I assume and hope most of these
hazards have now long since been smoothed out. But, as we can seen from the New
Zealand photo (from reddit) above, Mother Nature again conspires to create road hazards like the
ones that once occurred throughout the United States.
