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THE SURVEY CREW EXPERIENCE – PART I

OREGON AND WASHINGTON, 1959-1969

FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH ED BUSCH, SEPTEMBER 2010

Construction of a road begins with a survey, and for many people, a career in road 

construction has often begun with working on a survey team.

Like many other people when Ed Busch

went to work for the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR), 

he didn’t have a highway-related career path in 

mind. He said he hadn’t planned to go to work “on 

a survey crew, but I just fell into it.” That was the 

summer of 1959, and he said it turned out to be 

“something I liked....I probably worked six months 

that first (year) when I first started working.”

When he came back to work the next 

spring, he was assigned to a crew led by Elmer 

Barkus and sent to a project in southwestern 

Washington. “We built a road up to the base of Mt. 

St. Helens, and a parking lot. Eventually, they were 

talking about putting a ski lodge up there,” he said. 

He remembers Harry Truman, the long-term 

resident of Spirit Lake Lodge who refused to leave 

when it became clear that the long-dormant

volcano was coming back to life. “He had a 

restaurant there,” Ed recalled, “and I used to eat 

breakfast in his lodge; talked to him regularly.

“Years later when it erupted, all that work 

just disappeared. It just blew up.” He 

remembered the boats, the lodge, and the other 

buildings on beautiful Spirit Lake: “That of course 

is under a couple of hundred feet of water now.”

During the 1960’s he was sent down to 

southwestern Oregon “on the Umpqua Highway 

and worked for Lyle Mulvanny.” While 

surveying areas around Crater Lake, they began to 

find remnants of another famous volcanic eruption. 

When Mount Mazama erupted 7,700 years ago, 

“this pumice was blown into the air....We were 

doing construction through one mountain hillside,” 

he recalled, and found pumice that “was so thick

Top: A construction photo of Crater Lake and Wizard Island from a 1935-36 project shows one of few points on Rim Road 

where motorists can take in the lake directly ahead of the car rather than through the side window. Final Construction 

Report PEC-7-C1, Unit 2 Grading. WFLHD Archives.
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and there was so much of it we had 40 foot cuts of 

pumice....There (were) holes in the ground where 

the pumice was evidently so hot that it burned the 

trees completely out.”

The holes created by those burned-out trees, 

often as big as “four feet in diameter,” put 

unacceptable hazards in the paths of the crew. 

“You’d be walking along and a hole would open 

up,” he said, “so we had to spend about two days 

looking for these holes so someone wouldn’t fall 

in.” Eventually, Ed remembered, when “we took 

the material out of the cuts for the fill we found 

pure grade charcoal where the trees had been burnt. 

You could probably use it for barbecuing.”

since found convenient solutions. “We didn’t have 

any kind of Electrotapes,” Ed pointed out. At 

Toketee Falls, also along the Umpqua Highway in 

the Umpqua National Forest, the design called for 

a bridge and they had to determine the “distance 

across from one rock face to another....There was 

no way of getting down and up the other side,” he 

said, so they had to use their own ingenuity and 

whatever non-traditional surveying tools they 

could lay their hands on. “One guy brought a bow 

and arrow one day,” he said. “We tied a line on, 

and we shot a line across that was long enough.” 

Then they measured that line against one of their 

300-foot survey chains to come up with the final 

measurement for the bridge.

Ed noted that he remained in that part of 

the state and “worked on the Lake of the Woods 

Highway for Lyle Mulvanny in 1964 and 

1965....We did some grading and slope staking 

and stuff like that. I spent a quite a bit of time with 

him.”

After that, he took a few years’ hiatus 

from the Federal Lands Program, then came back 

to BPR in 1969, and spent a summer working “on 

North Cross State Highway in northern 

Washington.” They were preparing a quarry site, 

he remembered, and the blasting contractor “failed 

to check his battery on his detonator. When we 

shot the quarry site, we ended up with rocks that 

were bigger than semi trucks....and it blew out a 

whole bunch of trees on this viewpoint.” That 

rock was eventually brought down to “the quarry 

site...for crushing,” he said, “for road base for 

asphalt pavement. We found live wires and they’d 

wire them up and shoot them again.” That 

incident, he observed, was one of those “foolish 

things that you hope wouldn’t happen, but did.” 

The contractor, he recalled “basically went broke 

because they had to re-drill everything....The guy 

failed miserably....

“They had a construction crew up the 

canyon, too,” Ed remembered, and after the road 

had been built, he recalled there had been “a lot of 

glacier runoff and avalanches.” One day, he said, 

“I was eating lunch, and sitting by a creek, a 

culvert, and I could see the ground” was settling. 

He walked over to the culvert site, and it was 

“running dirty water and then clean water, dirty 

water then clean water.” That evening after work, 

he talked to the project engineer. “I said I think 

Widening a pumice cut on Rim Road: A 75-HP caterpillar and 

LaTourneau at work near Station 920 during a 1935-36 

constuction project. Final Construction Report on Rim Road, 

PEC-7-C1, Unit 1 Grading & PEC-7-B, 7-C, Widening. 

WFLHD Archives.

The cuts they made in that area caused 

another set of problems as well. “The hillsides 

(were) washing out because we cut past the lava 

flows, down...ten feet into lava flows. So they 

brought a guy in with seismic equipment.” Ed was 

sent along to assist him and, he recalled “we’d go 

out and set up recorder phones on the construction 

line. (Then) we’d set up dynamite charges and it 

would record where the lava flow was.” The data 

was sent back to the Design staff in Portland and 

they used it to determine the road grade “so we 

wouldn’t go so far down into the lava that it would 

cause a wash-out.” 

There were other unique challenges in those 

days, challenges to which modern technology has 
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something’s going on there, we better...take a look 

at it. Well, it turned out (that) overnight a dam had 

broken the pipe, so it was running water underneath 

the road the whole time. I don’t know how many 

thousand yards we had to redo: the pipe, the whole 

fill.”

In that part of the project there were three 

bridges and “one of the mountains had to be 

pinned...it was like a fault line,” he said. “They 

had to drill steel into the mountain and pin...the 

whole mountain to keep it from sliding...”

It was on that part of the project that “I 

almost got killed on that job,” Ed recalled. “I was 

working on one of the bridges...where they had 

drilled in some rebar and they were grouting it in 

for the wing walls on the east side of this one 

bridge.” He was standing on the road, talking with 

the contractor’s superintendent, “and this kid drove 

up the hill past us with a compressor (behind) a 

pickup.” Ed didn’t give much thought to the 

passing truck, but when the driver parked and 

“unhooked the compressor from the pickup....he 

didn’t block the wheels on the compressor...”

“My back was to him, (but) the 

superintendent was...looking...that way.” The 

driver got out of the truck “and it came rolling down 

the hill.” The contractor’s man took off running, 

and “I just instinctively... ran the same (direction).

“It had rolled right into where I was 

standing” only a moment before, he said. “It went 

into the ditch (and) rolled a quarter of a turn...If it 

would have been another quarter of a turn, it would 

have run right over the side of the canyon. “I had to 

have a cup of coffee after that.”

That incident underscored one of the most 

important lessons he learned on the job. “You had 

to always be on your toes,” he said. “That was the 

closest...I ever came to getting injured or killed.” 

He stressed that it was essential to remain vigilant 

when moving through the construction site while 

the heavy equipment was operating. “A lot of guys 

would get so busy that they wouldn’t look around,” 

he said, but to be safe, “you had to stop and let them 

find (you) and see you.”

Ed recalled that “The North Cross State was 

one of the last jobs (where) they had a tent camp 

and you had to pack in (on) horses. By the time he 

was assigned to the project, however, “most every 

one of the guys lived out of a trailer and had their 

families with them. They had hauling rigs: they 

could hook onto the trailer and pull it themselves. 

Engineering Camp at Tunnel Creek during a 1930’s era 

reconstruction and surfacing project. Final Construction 

Report, Columbia Falls-Glacier Park, Section 13-F1. WFLHD 

Archives.

So I was just at the very end of the tent camp 

thing,” he said. It came to an end “about a year 

before I started.”

The end of the tent camp era was just 

one of many changes he noticed during his BPR 

career. The enactment of the Environmental 

Protection Act in 1969 brought about other 

changes. “There are some things that we did 

before the environmental impact statements,” he 

said, remembering in particular the project he’d 

worked on in Southern Oregon for Lyle Mulvanny. 

“On the Umpqua River,” he recalled, “we had a 

rock that was in the river when we built the fill....

“You did things...that made the road 

conditions” better he explained, and in the case of 

this rock, removing it would improve the 

alignment, and therefore the safety of the road. 

“They loaded it with dynamite. I stood behind a 

tree when they blew it and I took pictures of it. 

There was no rock left, there was just a ripple.”

Another project that would require proper 

environmental documentation today was one he 

worked on near Riddle in Douglas County, 

Oregon. “The Forest Service had wanted us to 

build this road along Cow Creek,” Ed recalled. By 

following an old railroad grade beside the creek, 

the project would be only about three miles long 

instead of the eleven miles that would be required 

if they were to take the road “up over the 

mountain...So we staked the job, and we had the 

contractor working on it.” They immediately 

began to find insulators from the old railroad days 

and evidence that Chinese conscripts had been 

brought in to do the work. “You could see the old 

signs on the rocks saying ‘5-cent cigars,’ and we 

found...snuff boxes brought by Chinese laborers.”
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The railroad company had eventually 

moved their grade to the other side of the creek, he 

said, and “when we got in there...we had this one 

place...where we started to take the cut out and the 

mountain started to slide.” They had to modify the 

plans, which added several miles to the project, 

“clear up over, eight miles up the mountain,” he 

said. “We had to (leave) a big hump in the road...to 

keep it from sliding,” he added, “because it was 

counterbalancing that hillside.” They added riprap, 

but unfortunately what was used was “a little 

smaller riprap than they planned on.

“I left the job shortly after,” he said, but 

when “we had the 1965 flood...it washed out that 

three miles of road that we had put in there because 

it was not big enough rip rap to protect the road.

“That was one of the things that was interesting” 

about putting a road through that area, he added. 

“The railroad encountered the same thing we did, 

and that’s the reason why they moved the railroad 

across the river. We found that out after we got into 

it.”

Just like the tent camps that once housed 

them, the large crews of surveyors are also now a 

thing of the past. Ed recalled that in the 1960’s 

BPR might have “350 guys in the field doing the 

survey. Now it’s down to maybe one guy walking 

around.” He recalled that sometime in the late 

1960’s or early 1970’s, “there was talk (that) 

BPR/FHWA was going to hand us over to the 

state, and that’s one reason probably why I left.” 

Ed took a job with Washington County Oregon, 

“because I wasn’t sure what was going to happen.”

His new employer didn’t measure up to 

the standards he’d developed while at FHWA, 

however. “I got nervous working for them 

because they took too many coffee 

breaks....they’d go and have a coffee break, then 

pack up and go have lunch, then pack up and go 

have another coffee break. I just couldn’t handle 

it.”

He left the County after six months on the 

job: it was just not the work culture to which he’d 

grown accustomed. “At FHWA or BPR you were 

expected to work and you were expected to do so 

many miles a day, and you did your work....I was 

always proud to get my paycheck from the FHWA. 

I worked hard.”

A 1935-36 view from the top of Mount Scott with Crater Lake just outside the lower left corner. Rim Road to Kerr Notch runs 

off to the left; Rim Road to the West Rim is on the right. The center road leads to Cloudcap view point. Final Construction 

Report on Rim Road, PEC-7-B, 7-C Surfacing. WFLHD Archives.

Ed Busch learned about BPR from a neighbor and eventually moved from a summer appointment to 

full time. After leaving FHWA and his short stint at Washington County, he did some work in finish 

carpentry for awhile before putting his FHWA materials testing experience to work at Carlson Testing 

in Tigard, Oregon.

Stories in this series have been developed by Marili Reilly from interviews and correspondence. 

Retirees who would like to share their memories may email marili.reilly@dot.gov.