Ben Oostdam's Autobiography: 1960-1963

page 36

OAHU 2 March-April, 1962

After discovering Hawaii's WWII Surplus, where we loaded our jeep with levels, transits, tripods, rods, range poles, sextants and more, we were ready to start surveying the beaches from land.

We used the horizon leveling method (left) as our beach profiling method. For positions, we employed Benchmarks, Range- and Base-lines and horizontal sextant angles (right).

• In the four months from March 1 to July 1, 1962, we ran 150 profiles on 5 islands. Most of these were reoccupied by our successors under the leadership of Ted Chamberlain and overall results were presented as HIG Technical Report 64-2 , but a preliminary report was presented by Fran Shepard on June 30, 1962.
  
• In the 40 years elapsed since, many more surveys have been made of the 139 Oahu beaches and those of the other islands, using such more sophisticated techniques as GPS and Total Station Geodimeter. In addition, the World Wide Web created the opportunity to publish such results as those of the most recent joint USGS - SOEST Beach Monitoring Program which ran 42 Oahu- and 36 Maui winter- and summer profiles from August 1994 to August 1999 .
  
• For the sake of updating my own memorybanks, I compiled from the WWW a series of recent beach and coast photographs and links of OAHU and hope to retrieve and process my own 1962 3D-slides as well as add the other islands.