John’s Ramblings

In the last week of January there was a break in the sewer line that runs from the street in front of my house, along my property, and across the ravine behind my house. The sewer line is configured like a big sink-trap underneath the stream at the bottom of the ravine. A routine weekly check of the line showed that there was a break somewhere at the bottom of the ravine.

Environmental crisis and calamity was averted in a 3 day process wherein they intercepted the sewage before it went through this pipe by vacuuming it out of a manhole in front of my house. While the vacuuming went on 24 hours a day in the street, another crew dug around in the swampy ground below to “fix” the leak. This fix was apparently was a band-aid maneuver that had a tactical goal of getting this crew home before Super Bowl Sunday, rather than the strategic goal of a permanent fix.

Fast-forward to May 1. Pickup trucks start coming and going again in the street, highly unusual given we are at the bottom of a dead-end hill. The sewer guys are back, and they brought friends in the form of a sub-contractor that digs holes and lays pipe on behalf of said sewer guys. “Welcome back”, says the affable fellow living at the end of the street. The friendly sewer guys inform me that work is to start next Monday, pipe arriving, chaos ensuing, etc..

Enter the utility locators. These are the folks that come in little white station wagons to spray colored markings all over your street, sidewalk, and lawn to mark where underground utilities are hidden. They have marked the street on 5 occasions over the last 3 years or so, so I have gained a little insight into this operation (3 of these occasions were for a separate project, a County job to repair the storm drain system. This project never actually took place, despite taxpayer money marking the jobsite 3 times). If there was ever a business plan put together to take advantage of local municipalities, utility companies, and construction contractors, this is it. It seems that for every “locate” job, they send two different guys, on two different days. One guy marks the water, sewer, telephone, and cable. Another guy comes the next day, and marks electricity and natural gas. Why two guys, you may ask? I would assume that they are then able to charge for two site-visits, rather than just one.

	Green would appear to be the color for sewer. The pointy arrow shows which way this stuff flows, which is a hard-right turn to run down my northern property line.
Yellow marks natural gas. “EOM” I assume stands for “End of Main”, as this is as far as they put the gas line when we converted a few years back.
	Blue has to represent water, because it would be hard to fight a fire if it stood for natural gas.
The red lines are the underground electrical lines that run from these transformer boxes to the houses on the street. Orange are telephone lines, some of which would not have been marked had I not pointed them out to the dude with the spraypaint. The phone lines to my house get missed every time, and they were dug up back when the natural gas line was being installed.
	Apparently 100% accuracy is not a requirement, as this water meter that lies directly in the work area has no blue markings within 30 feet
Street marked, Monday the 7th rolls around and stuff starts happening… just before it stops. This load of 50 foot pipe arrives, is offloaded by this backhoe, and promptly declared to be the wrong diameter.

Fast forward again, to this week. Wednesday the 23rd the little white station wagons show up again, tracing over the same markings they made 3 weeks ago. Both guys. And yes, they did not re-mark my buried phone lines (because I didn’t stand there and point them out), and yes they missed the water running to that one meter. I assume they are just looking at a map of the last time they did the marking on this street incorrectly, and repeating the same incorrect markings. I think that as long as that’s all they are doing, the subcontractor could incorrectly interpret the location of all underground utilities themselves, and cut out the middleman.

Work actually began on Thursday, as they started to “fuse” these 50 foot sections of pipe together, and began to drag them down my property line. Next week they will begin the process of pulling the new line completely across the ravine. That should be entertaining, and hopefully they won’t have to call in the utility locators again, even if the job is stopped for a 3 day weekend.

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