Life at Lynch · November 2026 · Community
There is a kind of survey where being close is fine. A property line staked to a hundredth of a foot, a topographic shot every twenty feet, a contour that smooths out the dips nobody will notice. Most work lives there, and it is good work.
This was not that.
The Southeastern Wisconsin Vietnam Veterans Memorial sits on the Milwaukee lakefront in Veterans Park. Three granite columns stand for those killed in action, those held prisoner or still missing, and those who came home. Spread below them is a fan of engraved bricks - 2,946 of them - each carrying a name, a rank, a branch and a date.
The memorial as we recorded it in July 2026, before any of it came up.
The problem with taking it apart
The memorial was built in 1991 on reclaimed lakefront ground. Thirty-five years of that ground settling and heaving had buckled the surface, and the bricks had worn. Patching was past the point of helping. The whole brick field had to come up so a proper base could go in underneath.
Which raises an obvious question, and it is not an engineering one. If you lift 2,946 bricks, how does each one find its way back to the right square foot of a fan-shaped plaza?
Families know where their brick is. They walk to it. People have been visiting the same square of pavement for three decades. A brick that comes back in roughly the right area is a brick that is lost.
And a second problem nobody ordered
Some of the engraving had weathered past reading. Not all of it - most bricks were fine - but enough that simply photographing the field from a normal height would have produced a record with holes in it. A name you cannot read is a name you cannot put back.
So the survey had two jobs at once: record where every brick was, to survey accuracy, and record what every brick said, legibly enough to transcribe. Those are usually two different exercises with two different tools.
This is not a photograph taken on the ground. It is a detail from the aerial survey.
Four feet up, flown by hand
Seth Oldenburg, our Sr. Survey Crew Chief, earned his FAA Remote Pilot Certificate earlier this year. This was the job that put it to work.
He started with control - six points set around the memorial, tied to each other within a hundredth of a foot, so everything that followed had something to be checked against.
Then the flying, and here is the part that makes other surveyors wince. To resolve lettering that worn, the camera had to be about four feet above the pavers. Mapping software will not do that. It refuses to plan or collect at that altitude, for reasons that are entirely sensible on every other job. So Seth flew it manually - a three-foot grid, laid out across the whole site, hand-flown pass after pass so that every brick was captured from several angles in several frames.
Thousands of photographs, each one geolocated with RTK GPS. Then photogrammetry stitched them into one image, and that image was checked back against the conventional survey and the control points to confirm it was true across the entire plaza rather than just in the comfortable middle.
What Came Out of It
About four tenths of a millimeter. Fine enough to read engraving a person standing over it could not.
Benches, walks, columns and structures, not just the brick field.
So drainage could be sorted out before the bricks went back down, rather than discovered the next spring.
Position and content for all 2,946 bricks, in a form a contractor could actually build from.
Every brick, every name, in one georeferenced image.
What it was actually for
Removal started in July. The memorial was rebuilt on a new base with new walks, and the bricks went back down in the arrangement the survey recorded. It was rededicated on Veterans Day 2026.
We did not rebuild it. The War Memorial Center raised the money and ran the project, and Pat Connerton of Pro Hardscape & Lawn and his crews, who lifted and reset nearly three thousand pavers by hand, did the hard part. Our part was the record, and then the layout: we came back in September to stake the curve geometry so the arcs could be rebuilt true.
But it is worth being clear about what that file was protecting. Not a tolerance. Not a quantity. A set of names that people drive across the city to stand on. When someone walks out to the fan this spring looking for a brother, a father, a friend from a unit, it will be where they left it.
That is a good use of a Tuesday.
The full technical write-up - control, flight method, resolution and deliverables - is on the project page.