Who says you're not excavating with a sledge hammer?

Recently a local contractor was installing new sidewalk and replacing some old sections. This required the removal of the old failed sidewalk, and the removal of about 6" of the soil to properly prepare the sub grade, rock and compact the area. The contractor, having heard of the "call before you dig" laws, knew he needed to call and locates were done prior to the work beginning. Once they had removed the old sidewalk, excavated the new area, placed rock and compacted it, it was time to set the concrete forms. Normally they use short stakes for the form supports, but the person setting the forms noticed the rock was loose in a couple areas, and the short stakes would not hold well, so he replaced them with longer stakes and drove them deeper to insure that they where "solid".

The worker said that the ground was real hard, like driving the stake into gravel, so he used a sledge hammer instead of the normal hammer. He was somewhat surprised when after driving the stake deep with the sledge hammer, water shot out of the ground next to the stake. He said he noticed the blue paint on the water meter box about 2 feet away, but figured the water line was deeper, besides the stake was small, and he had never hit anything before. Lucky for him it was only a water service line and he got to go home only a little wet at the end of the day.

Fire!

On April 12, 2007 a contractor working in Keizer, OR. was amending the soil with a large dozer size rot tiller. While tilling the operator ran into a 6” poly gas main shredding approximately 22 feet of the main before the gas migrated into the engine compartment igniting the escaping fuel. The operator was injured by the fire while escaping from his tiller and one other employee was injured rushing to help the operator.

This contractor had failed to call for locates.

Bore Machine vs. Mini Van

This is amazing.

A contractor in Portland was directional drilling a new power system, after completing the first leg which ran from west to east (click here for plat map with arrows) he then decided to relocate the drill and shoot east to west around a corner.

While attempting the second shot the bent two drill rods after only boring approximately 20 to 30 feet. The foreman who was using a locating device to monitor the location of the drill head went back to the bore machine and told the operator to pull the bent rods out and re-shoot in the same hole.

Instead of monitoring the head of the drill using his locator during the new shot, the lead man stayed back at the drill and was conversing with the operator. Their shot went off line, continued in a southerly path, damaged a 2” gas main, came up out of the asphalt, went forward another 100 feet and went through the mini van.

In the end the owner of the van had to watch in horror as the van jumped and lurched all over the place with a drill rod sticking in it.

POINT OF THE STORY:

Don’t ever shoot a bore without monitoring its progress… and never ever assume the rod will just follow a previous bore…….

A 12 inch Sanitary Sewer force main was bored thru due to the failure to pothole the crossing area. The line was located, and the obvious pavement cut was evident for the pipes location.

Instead of potholing the pipe, the boring supervisor measured the depth of the pipe in a manhole located about 75 feet from where they hit the pressure sewer main and bored at a depth that he thought would have taken it under the pipe, if it was at the same depth. It was not.

The boring tool was re-inserted, like a finger in the dike, back into the pipe to reduce the amount of sewage leaking from the line served by a 2,000 GPM pump station. Luckily the boring tool made an almost perfect hole, that was easy to repair with a pressure repair band, and a minimal amount of sewage was spilled.

What's Missing in this Picture?

In February, 2006 this Well-Driller was going about his business drilling a new well for a homeowner in Polk county, OR.

The homeowner was satisfied all was progressing as planned, and the well driller was, "just doing his business". The well driller thought the homeowner had done all the homework making sure the utility locates were done, as is specified in their contract, thus they were not required to call for locates. Fortunately, a buried underground electric primary conductor was between them and the edge of this road. They DID NOT know that at the time they began drilling.

The good news was:

1) After this well-driller was asked if he'd called in for locates, and admitted he hadn't, “HE MADE THE CALL”

2) After receiving the locates, the underground electric primary conductor was just between his tires and the edge of the road

Whenever you are excavating around a right-of-way or easement, you “SHOULD SEE LOCATE MARKS”

Tacoma Dome Loses Communications

	Here are two pictures from a damage that wiped out ALL communications to the Tacoma Dome. The excavator who caused the damage stated that he measured 25 inches from the outside edge of the locate and put the bore into the ground!
	Oh,by the way, this excavator had his bore machine sitting directly ON TOP of a manhole lid! He didn't even bother to open the manhole to see if he could tell where the duct-run went.

We Hit Our Mark!

Here's a picture depicting damage caused by directional drilling - because they did not pothole to determine the exact location of the buried facility FIRST.

Oh, they did do a pothole ..... only it was 30 FEET away from were they were actually drilling! This picture was taken after the repair was completed and the new fiber cable was pulled in. The excavator was not allowed to remove the bore rod until after the repairs were done because 2 of the 24 fibers were cracked, but still working!

We were able to re-route the majority of traffic to those two fibers, however ANY movement of the damaged fiber caused garbled throughput in the phone system.