Call Before You Dig
Call Before You Dig
For the first time in a long time, I have a woman asking me if I want to meet for a coffee.
I'd love to, but some fucking moron decided to dig without calling first and busted open a water main for the whole neighborhood and now I can't even take a shower. I am about to go to the store to buy a bunch of jugs of water just so I can flush the toilet.
No timeline on when it's going to be fixed, either.
Sometimes it really feels like the universe just likes to spit in my fucking face and then laugh at me.
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I wanted to plant a tree today. Dug a hole. Hit my Internet cable and cut it clean in half. Just my Internet cable though, not the whole neighbourhood. But still.... no Internet until at least Tuesday.
I don't how calling could have saved me from this predicament though. But at least now you know the universe doesn't hate you, it hates everyone equally.http://www.callbeforeyoudig.org/washington/
At least in Washingon there are free services to locate pipes and lines for this exact purpose.
Also, it's a legal requirement for anything deeper than 12 inches, and the 12 inch exemption is mostly for homeowners and road work.
https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=19.122
Finally, I'm pretty sure you'd have be using a backhoe or other industrial equipment to bust open a water main that affects a whole neighborhood.
I remember when a company doing road work did do due diligence, called, was told exactly where an oil pipeline was.
Then they hit the pipeline.
Turned out that the US oil company had lost the maps showing the precise pipeline location and had lied to everyone.
Fuck big oil.
In my city we had a huge tunnel project a few years ago. The giant boring machine hit a pipe and broke, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in delays. Turns out it was one of the pipes that they had drilled into the ground to check soil conditions for the tunnel. Their own goddamn pipe, they just forgot it was still down there.
That one made me snort!
Yeah, joe shmoe the average homeowner is never going to hit a water main. Those are going to be over 6ft down so there's basically no way you hit one with a shovel.
In Canada, click before you dig (same thing rebranded) they can only locate public utilities. So water, power, gas, maybe main data lines. But private lines aren’t, so if someone installed a shed and ran power, click before you dig can’t find it.
Sometimes you need to pay a private locator, they will dig through permits and prints, and use tools to locate possible lines. But if a homeowner buried their own power or water lines…. Your SOL in all regards.
Calling is how you get someone to make sure there's no cables down there.
I doubt they'd mark non-dangerous, buried by the lowest bidder, no paperwork fiber cables. But you never know.
They’re supposed to.
It’s all part of the service, right? Also losing internet could be dangerous in the same way a landline phone cable is. (Ie preventing someone with VOIP phone service from calling for help.)
It can also cause harm for people who work from home, etc.