Critical Safety: Hand-Locating Underground Utilities

So this brings us to the next phase of the excavation and that's handlocating all of the the power lines. That includes electric, gas, phone, and cable are usually pretty easy because they're right at the surface. But electric and gas are usually buried anywhere from 12 in to 2 ft below the surface. And if we catch one of those with just the tooth of an excavator bucket, it could cause big damage. So, what we've got to do is we've got to hand dig down and expose those lines so that we can get a visual cue. We know where they're at. And that way, that tells us how safe we are to dig in that area. Technically, you're not supposed to use power tools to dig over or around those lines. So, so we always hand excavate to find them before we start working around them. Yeah. So, you're looking for utilities, right? Correct. Mine there. It's running somewhere in here. I found the base from the driveway or from the parking lot, but I haven't found any utilities yet. So you want to dig at least a foot and a half, 18 in to 2 ft below where we would potentially be excavating. So we're going to be digging down 6 in in this area. Uh right through here, right? 6 in. So I'd want to be if you want to be 18 to 2 ft. So I'd want to be like 30 in down. 30 in down and then a trench across. So, not just in one spot because if you miss this area over here and we find it with the tooth of an excavator, that could be a big problem. So, how wide I mean I know when we dug the one in um St. Paul, I think we did 3 ft this way across the line or where we thought the line would be. How wide would you go? Oh, well, I would go to the edge of the pond. So, the width of the width of our excavation area.