Do you think it would be easy to find the drill holes in the snow ?
I addressed this, if cryptically, in my "April Fool's" post on the other board...
I think it would have been a fairly simple matter to find them four years ago... even before Chance, in his first report, had to tell them that that's what they'd needed to do before they drilled the first holes...
Finding stuff you need to find underground... just isn't rocket science today... even if the tools used are pretty clearly a byproduct of rocket science. How hard it is to find something depends on only a couple of fairly obvious things...
1. How good are you at finding things ? Do you have the knowledge, skills, and tools required ?
Obviously, the SRSR management's skill sets are not overly well optimized for finding previously drilled holes. They appear to be short on some pretty obvious basic awareness of "how to look", lacking the knowledge, the skills and the tools. So, "progress" has been slow, costly, even agonizingly painful.... the effort marred by pointlessly repeating the same errors as had already made before, at great expense... most recently wasting a years time and effort, and all the money raised and spent on drilling holes in the wrong places, AGAIN...
Hopefully, this time, the effort made in looking will be executed by people with a clue who actually know what they're doing ?
2. How far away from finding "it" are you likely to be when you do start looking ?
Obviously, the farther you are from the thing when you start... the longer it will probably take you to complete a proper grid search before you're likely to find the first of the things you're looking for...
There's more to that than it seems at first... beyond the obvious in looking in the right country, province, township... close to the right coordinates, etc. Here, they already had what you can assume is pretty good info to start... so they were needing only the basic skills required to be able to translate the coordinates from one grid to another, etc. But, with uncertainties in the references the original grid is based on, and with uncertainty in the quality of the independently based local grid, and with other unknowns imposed by the variations existing between various coordinate systems used in mapping, etc ? The uncertainties should have been boiled down to an uncertainty factor... or, a set of them, depending on various assumptions re the different coordinate systems likely to have been used (which aren't exactly infinite)... which would produce a bunch of spots of higher potential than average, with concentric/overlapping circles in probability. "Close" might not be near as close as you think it should be initially... but probability applied properly should reduce the task in looking by 80% or more... even if you were wrong about any aspect of which coordinate systems were used when the work was done originally. Still, the point: you can address what you don't know better than just assuming that what you don't know means you don't know anything about where to look.
Before they'd recovered the first hole.... given the information they already had to start with, you should have seen them start looking by first computing the probabilities. Then, as Zilly points out, note the nature of the terrain and the cover... Not all the holes will have been drilled at the bottoms of draws where leaves are piled up three feet deep... none will have been drilled where the drill can't go... so the probabilities are adjusted from the purely mathematical in probability adjustments to sets of coordinates, to account for the variations in terrain, vegetation... proximity to linear boundaries (roads, lake shores, scarps) that help reduce the circular errors. So, which of those many original holes were drilled in more exposed places... on hill tops instead of valley bottoms... a known distance from the lake shore or a road ? Go looking for those, first ? Did the drill logs note the thicknesses of the surface litter they had dealt with ? Where was the soil and overburden least before they hit solid rocks ? Etc. Look first for those that should be easiest to find. Out of a couple hundred holes drilled... a couple should stand out as being more likely to be found easily... and you should probably go look for those, specifically ? I have a lot of questions about how they DID proceed in doing the "looking" that they did...
In hind sight... now having found one accidentally, and by luck alone... they clearly didn't get the transformations or the grid transport right in any of their prior efforts. I think perhaps they didn't even bother with actually looking... or, if they did, what they did didn't give them much of chance of success ?
Now, having found solid evidence of one hole... that should allow them to make the corrections they'd made improperly before, at least in relation to the math as applied to that one hole... and, that mathematical "change" applied to finding that one hole, by getting the two grids to line up accurately on that one spot, at least... might well and probably should enable recovering the entire grid pretty easily... perhaps with minor adjustments in angles... meaning searching along well defined arcs instead of within probabilistically defined circles...
Putting that as a question: If you do find one of the "missing" holes... does that mean you've found all the ones that have been "misplaced"... or just the one ? How good was their grid... so that getting precise location information on the one hole in both grids... means the others can easily be re-referenced to the new grid with few problems, just with a simple mathematical transformation ?
"Assuming" they'd done it right before, obviously didn't work out too well in the past... so, they can't proceed from here to just "assume" again they've done it right this time ? They'll need to PROVE they can find the others based on having found the one... by finding them. That "shouldn't" be too hard, now... given they're pretty sure they're looking in more or less the right places... ?
3. How good are your tools ?
The tool you need to use to locate something hidden in the ground... is a ground penetrating radar. Most serious building contractors have them and know how to use them, or they know where to get them and hire people to use them, because you're always having to locate old pipes and utility conduits underground... and it's always better to locate old septic tanks first using a GPR, rather than by having your heavy tractor or D-9 falling into it.
The vagaries in the terrain and cover shouldn't matter too much... if you're focused properly on looking for the right holes... based on looking for those that should be the easiest to find... given the tools you apply.
Snow might be an issue making it harder, or impossible... or, it might make dragging a small GPR unit mounted on a plastic snow disk a whole lot easier... easier, at least, than it would be in the summer time, if you were dragging it over rougher surfaces and vegetation.
There's probably some unit out there that is designed to be used in exactly those conditions... but, you'd probably have to know something about GPR... at least know enough to know that's the tool you need... before you could figure out which one is the right tool to use ? I don't think the snow itself should interfere too much... but some units might need to be closer to the dirt than others in order to work... so, maybe need a unit with more power if the snow is deeper ? Call up a GPR expert and ask...
A fourth issue, of course, in the assumption that the thing(s) you're looking for are tied together in a bundle well enough that finding the first proof will result in the rest just "falling into place" without much more effort being made. Maybe Gulf Dominion did a lousy job of mapping their holes accurately ? The data we have suggest they're not close to being the weak point in the effort made in recovery, thus far.
A snow shovel, a broom, and a tank of propane with a hand held burner wand (a "weed dragon"... $35 on E-bay) might make a quick job of removing any covering layer of snow that's masking a spot where the GPS says you should look more closely...
It's WAY beyond ridiculous that this has been such a problem...
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