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Clipped a buried gas line on a pond job in Baton Rouge, still second guessing my locate call
We were cutting a 40 foot wide channel through a pond berm near Baton Rouge and my locate marks showed the line running about 15 feet north of where the bucket actually caught it. I stopped the cut, flagged the spot, and we hand dug around it for two hours to find the real run before calling the utility out. What do you all do when the paint marks and the actual line don't match, do you trust the marks or dig test holes every pass?
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tarah578d ago
15 feet off?? That is wild, how does a locate miss by that much on a marked run. Paint can be off a foot or two but 15 feet means somebody flagged the wrong line or the tone jumped to a different pipe. I would not trust those marks for anything after that, every pass would get a test hole or at least a probe before the bucket goes in. You did the right thing stopping the cut, a gas line in a pond berm is a nightmare if it lets go, you get gas bubbling up through the water and nobody knows where its coming from. Two hours of hand digging beats explaining a rupture to the utility and whoever owns that pond.
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