locating under ground utilities (one call)

[BlazinSS934]

Well I didn't yank them out completely lol. I damaged one real bad they weren't in conduit it was DB so I didn't have a snowballs chance in hell of feeling the cable. One cable was totally shot the next one had like 150 pairs damaged and the other two had some gouges in the outer jacket. The problem with telephone in my area is the fact that they never ever come to mark out an emergency within the required 2 hours and they rarely get a routine mark out done within the 3 business days they are allotted. They didn't bill us for the repair so I guess that would be an admission of guilt hehe
I was shocked that they didn't want to use my digging box and had an outside contractor come and shore the excavation. Probably do it that way to pad the bill lol

Gotta try to find pictures on my old phone

Sal

[CM1995]

Had another project in downtown Birmingham, luckily for us we found out after the first one-call that the main fiber optical cable running from Meridian, MS to Atlanta was located in the ROW a couple of feet away from where we had to tie into an existing storm drain..

We had a guy from AT&T that was basically "assigned" to the project the whole time we were digging, almost became part of the crew. He would start when we would start and quit when we would. He stayed on the job until the storm pipe was tied into the junction box and a couple joints laid out of it. Funny thing about it was we never uncovered the fiber line or really got close to it.

His time was no charge and we were glad he was there. Remember, always call One-Call before you dig, you never know what main line is running through your project. I don't even want to think about how much it would have cost if we would have hit that line.

[BlazinSS934]

The Gas company has 2 guys dedicated to High Pressure gas main supervision. They have a route that they drive once a day and they also get tickets from one call and they supervise any one digging within 100 feet of a 100# HP gas main and within 250feet of a 350 # gas main. The gas co and electric co are combined they follow the same practices. Anytime you dig near a hydrostatic transmission cable they watch you. I like it because they know exactly where their utilities are


Sal

[CM1995]

The Gas company has 2 guys dedicated to High Pressure gas main supervision. They have a route that they drive once a day and they also get tickets from one call and they supervise any one digging within 100 feet of a 100# HP gas main and within 250feet of a 350 # gas main. The gas co and electric co are combined they follow the same practices. Anytime you dig near a hydrostatic transmission cable they watch you. I like it because they know exactly where their utilities are


Sal

That reminded me of a long time ago when my father was building houses in a subdivision that had a natural gas transmission line running through it. They completed the first sector and was working on the second sector that the gas line basically separated. They would walk a loader across the pipeline and sure enough within an hour or so there would be Southern Natural Gas trucks show up and ask what they were doing. I always wondered how they knew a piece of heavy equipment had crossed their line. Do they have any way of detecting vibration or weight? They didn't drive by while the loader was crossing it nor did the plane that fly's the line, fly over while they were doing it.