Dayexco it sounds like you have a good utility company to work with.
For the sake of a little thread hijackery, I tell a story about
one
interaction I had with Bellsouth Telephone, now part of AT&T I believe. We had a town home project where a large pedestal was located right in the middle of the new entrance to the project. Couldn't move the road over due to a small access area and county requirements for ROW and such, believe me if we could have I would have.
So we had completed the clearing and grubbing and had the center lines laid out for all the roads plus the entrance. I contacted Bellsouth (took 45 mins to reach an engineer that even knew what I was needing
) and initiated what I knew would be a painful process.
After the initial contact and a few site meetings (read 2 months later), I received the "cost" to move the pedestal 20' - $10K and change!
Of course I was so mad I was spitting nails but what do you do? So I sent them a check for $10K, with all backup paper work and phone calls to the "engineer" (I have dealt with these folks before
).
A month goes by from my Bellsouth rectal exam payment and we are at the point were we are tying in the domestic water to the main line and getting ready to string curb line. I hadn't seen hide nor hair of a work crew and the only correspondence with the "engineer" has been to leave him voice mails. So the water is tied in and we begin fine grading the streets and I leave the "engineer" a voice mail (version cleaned up for HEF of course :cool2) that we are pouring curbs and paving and would he like his pedestal in the middle of our new entrance?
The last VM to the "engineer" obviously got results. Received a call from the engineer that a crew would be out tomorrow to begin moving the pedestal, great I thought only
3 months after the initial meeting and
1 month after I paid them. The gypsy subcontractor crew that showed up was so pathetic that I
almost felt sorry for them, except the thought of my Bellsouth rectal exam cost was still fresh in my mind.
The "crew" had an early '80's Ford single axle with some shovels and an air compressor. This project was solid Alabama chert and if anyone has ever worked it, you know that these guys were in for workout. They sawed and chipped rock for 3 days prepping the trench for the conduit. We had our curb stakes in and graded up to the pedestal. I told them it was not deep enough to be below subgrade but they "assured" me that they would get it deep enough. At this point 98% of my patience had been used up and the other 2% just didn't care.:bash
Fast forward to the completion of the pedestal move. Curbs go down and we are prepping the subbase for stone base. The motor grader clips the conduit (it was deep enough alright
) but doesn't damage the wiring. Operator asks me what to do, I say let's dump base. :thumbsup (There was 6" of curb face at the paving section and a 9" paving section so we didn't clip the conduit while grading for curbs.)
If this pedestal in the story would have been a dead end pedestal....there wouldn't be a story I would want to repeat.
