mhaider
Premium
join:2001-03-25
Watertown, SD
| I work for the utility company where I live, and for 18 years I worked as a "locator", the person that marks the gas, elec, and water lines when a locate request comes in. If you call the onecall center for your area they should contact all affected utility companies in your area, ie gas, elec, water, sewer, cable, and telco. As far as the depth of lines, it can vary due to many factors, but the only way to really know how deep your lines are is to call your onecall center to get your lines located, then dig a hole to expose them to see the actual depth. I wouldn't do this if I was just aerating my lawn, but for other projects it's a good idea. For example, I'm going to be planting trees in my yard, I staked out the locations as to where I'm going to plant them and called for locations, where I planned on putting one tree was right on top of the gas line, so now I have to adjust that trees location. One other thing, if you do expose a line to see how deep it is, be very careful not to nick the outer coating, in time the nick could allow moisture to get into the line and cause it to fail which would cause an outage for that particular service to your house. Even worse would be cutting an electric or gas line which could be potentially dangerous. |
