Utility Locate Companies

[Road Guy]

How do they stay in business? They seem to hire people at 7 bucks an hour to locate gas lines, that cost major money when they get marked incorrectly and a big mess ensues to clean it up?

 

[Flyer_PE]

^Who pays them? I'm not sure how it works everywhere but I think most of those companies are paid through a state agency of some kind. If you are expecting performance and efficiency from that mechanism, you are going to be disappointed.

 

[mudpuppy]

Don't know about other states, but around here I believe they are paid for through the utilities. Ultimately it is the utility's responsibility to ensure the lines are marked correctly.

 

[benbo]

This is actually a part of my new job - regulating these digin laws. I met several of these people at a recent seminar and couldn't believe there was a seminar just for this. But if they mark gas lines wrong, not only is it a mess, sometimes these things catch fire. Of the ones I talked to, the gas utilities ended up doing most of their own marking, it was the telecom companies that hired people like these guys -

http://www.utiliquest.com/site/

 

[Desert Engineer]

At the small water district i work for, we have a person that only does locates and construction meters sets. As Benbo mentioned, The gas company does their own locates; and the telcom/elec uses utiliquest.

I have seen some situations where the utiliquest guy became confused and located our waterlines as electric lines. You think the valve can with the 3' diameter concrete collar and the blue paint that says water would be the give away that it's not electrical. I've noticed that the locaters will try to out wait each other to be the last one to locate.

I've had a project that required the gas locater to stand by for about 36hrs ( i had 3-12 hour shifts come in). There is a new law in california that anytime work is done near a high pressure gas main, the gas company has to have a rep on site during the entire construction. My crew started opening up the ground for an emergency 24" watermain replacement, when the gas guy drove by. The locater didnt care, because of the OT, but his supervisor was really pissed. after 36 hrs, he looked pretty bad.

 

[MGX]

Telecom guys are the worst offenders it seems.

We were trenching a new fireline and our UG guy swore there was a telephone line in the way. The locator said there was no line.

We started to dig and severed a 48 pair copper telephone line. Of course the locator tried to blame us, but ended up with his tail in a sling. Thankfully, the local news station threw the locator under a bus in their news report as to why no landlines worked in the area. :w00t: