PLSO The Oregon Surveyor May/June 2021

8 The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 44, No. 3 Member Spotlight SPOTLIGHT Member By Vanessa Salvia Darryl Anderson Anderson Engineering S ome surveyors stumble across the career on their own, while others have an introduction. Darryl An- derson falls into the latter category. His father, Sherman Anderson, was a land surveyor for the U.S. Forest Service. He was his father’s unofficial assistant during the ages of 10 to 12. “I went out with hima lot when I was young and followed the survey crews around,” Anderson recalls. “We located a lot of roads and found original GLO corners.” Anderson, who grew up in Lakeview, Ore- gon, went out into the field with his father more often as he got older, and that turned into summer work until he took on other jobs during his high school years. At the time, he enjoyed being outdoors, although he admits that he occasionally got a little bored looking for GLO corners. “But overall, it was something I really liked to do,” he says. “It was enjoyable. My father and I had some memorable moments, and found some corners that other people couldn’t find. Even when he got older and couldn’t get around very well, he still enjoyed going out.” There really weren’t any careers other than engineering- and surveying-related fields that he considered. He went to col - lege right after high school and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineer- ing in 1978, from OIT. The surveying background he had from his personal experience plus the courses in school gave him a real “leg up” when he started his career. After school, he worked for a short time for the Forest Service, and then three years with an en- gineer in Lakeview named Barry Norris. Anderson ran a survey crew, did a lot of field work, and also worked in the office on engineering design projects. That firm also did a lot of cadastral surveys for the Forest Service, so Anderson spent a lot of time out on those, as well as private work and corner searches, especially fur- ther afield in Eastern Oregon. “My father was really good at retracement and finding old GLO corners,” Anderson says. “As things advanced, I got my sur- veying and engineering licenses in 1983.” The two Andersons started their own firm in 1983. In 1991, Darryl opened a branch in Redmond, Oregon, and continued of- fering surveying and engineering from Lakeview and Redmond, keeping the Redmond office fully staffed until 2008. At that time, some may recall, was when the nation experienced a recession, so they phased out that office in favor of their Lakeview location. Sherman Ander- son passed away in 2016, but they had a good, long career together. While the main focus of Anderson En- gineering has been Northern California and Eastern Oregon, Anderson has also done a fair amount of surveying in other parts of the state. He has also traveled with a group called Engineering Ministries International, a Colorado-based Chris- tian ministry that connects architects, engineers, and other design profession- als with developing economies. These projects were in Uganda and two proj- ects in Nicaragua. “A team of us went over there and we de- signed a school complex and surveyed the area, put in water supplies, and sewer facilities,” Anderson says. “I’ve done oth- er projects in Nicaragua with Engineering Ministries. Those were challenging... get- ting your surveying equipment there and back in one piece!” Currently, Anderson stays busy doing engineering and design work for com- mercial and municipal projects as well as private surveying projects, with two full-time surveyors in the office in addi - tion to himself. He says his office does a lot of land partitions, lot line adjust- ments, boundary surveys, and work on various development projects. For in- stance, a company is building a biofuel plant in Lakeview that has kept the firm busy for a couple of years. “We did a lot of layout staking and anchor bolt layout control surveys for that project,” Darryl Anderson surveying in Uganda.