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Utility Damage Prevention and Reporting

For any company that works underground the possibility of striking a utility is everpresent. The denser the population the more likely that foreign utilities will cross the work space. Electric Conduit Construction is diligent when excavating or drilling. All marked utilities are pot holed and positively identified before work begins. If the Foreman and crew are suspicious that a utility was unmarked the area will be explored through hydro-excavation and careful hand digging. This prework gives us assurance that a project can be completed without cross boring or other types of utility strikes. It is good for our business, our customers and the community.

On numerous occaisions this approach to excavation and drilling has paid big dividends by uncovering crossing utilities and avoiding costly strikes. 

When a utility is improperly marked and is indicated as outside of the exclusion zone, or worse, is simply not marked, then the odds of hitting it goes up and damage will occur. In these cases it is important for our crews to accurately document what happened. Today, with the ubiquity of cell phones and ipads it is easy to photograph a site. The photographic documentation must be something more than a few snapshots. Every angle of the job must be photographed along with the original locate marks and the postion of the excavator. 

To aid our crews in this process we buried pieces of pipe in our construction yard and then erroneously marked the dummy utilities. When the operator hit it the training began on how to document the process. With the help of Rhino Hit Kits the documentation became much easier for our crews. The large yellow scale and vertical markers helped them to tell the story of the utility strike. When the foreman uploads this information in to our cloud based Construction View, a permanent, stored record of the event is created. This enables us to communicate with the utility as well as the locator to explain that the utility was either mis-located or unmarked. 

Training our crews to help them act responsibly and be safe is a very high priority for Electric Conduit Construction. Utility work is inherently dangerous and every measure to prevent damage needs to be exercised at all times. When a strike does occur it needs to be documented properly. Electric Conduit Construction operates throughout the upper midwestern states and works on Telecommunications, wireless, wireline, and fiber optic systems. 

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