Be Careful around UNDERGROUND POWER!

I started construction of my Pole Barn that is located between my home and the overhead Power lines.
My home has underground power supply and I did as I always do, and called "CallBeforeYouDig".
They came out a few days ago and did the locating.
I am a very cautious person, so I started digging my first hole by hand, instead of using my auger.
This hole was located about three feet from the painted mark.
I dug down about FOUR INCHES, and found the buried power supply almost dead center.
Good thing I didn't use the auger!
Just sad that the utility locater can't do any better then that.
I might add that this power supply was located about a year ago, by a different person, and it was marked in almost the same spot!

Best line locator is a backhoe.

They say they can be off three or four feet from the actual line. I would think the line would be deeper than four inches anyway. We buried some here and it was down at least two feet.

Hi
A few members of my family have been gifted with the art of dowsing with bent welding rods.
There has been a few times I've been out with the "witch craft sticks" and found lost pipes or lines guys can't find.
If you can do it it's pretty neat, to see the look on guys faces when they dig down, and find what they wanted. Nowhere near where they thought it was.
The Strange thing is my Mom can't do it on her own, but if me or dad touch her, the rods start to work with her holding them!
Sometimes old technology is way better than this new fangled stuff L.O.L
Regards Robert

all too often!

I have been locating cables for over 30 years so i can tell you
that Locating is as much an art as a science. Some times
inductive coupling occurs giving faults peaks (mislocate). If
you are near a high RF field such as radar or broadcast
transmitter, you can also get faults readings. I have seen many
times when the locate s spot on and an abandon line is found
such as the one you described as being 4 feet off.

Twice in my life time i have had dealing with the CALL BEFORE YOU DIG. One time while working in the Oil patch around here some thirtyfive years ago i had to put in and entrance way in and build a drilling location , i saw the boxes along the road for under ground phone lines and i called ahead of any dirt moving . The next day i meet the guy at the site and he hooked up his gizzmo and marked out where the line was SUPPOSE to be , i told him to just stick around for a little bit . I jumped up on the dozer and started my cut staying away from his marks and on the third pass with the blade here comes a big black cable about four inches round rollen off the blade . There were about a thousand little fraid wire sticking out the end . It was NOT the line he had marked BUT a trans continental that he did not mark. Dodged the bullet on that one since he told me there was NOTHING else to worry about. Then there was the time i was helping a friend put in a new housing development and it was to have all under ground utility’s , We had the streets in and curbs poured and the base down for the pavement and i started to dig the ditches for the under ground stuff as per Ohio Edison told us . They said to run the stabilizer of the back hoe close to the curb and just dig about forty inches deep all around the development and they would dig the ditches to the transformer pads themselfs. And they would backfill all of them when they were done . When i was done with the ditching Myself and my buddy went to another town to cut paths for a servery to lay out the streets on another development , we were up there for a week cutting paths so they could set centerline for the new streets . When we came back to the Forest the engineers came by and told us that they had made a mistake on the culvert and that we had to dig out the one thirty inch one and install a 48 inch that went UNDER the curbs and street and under the now installed power lines with 7600 volt that is now LIVE . This is going to be fun as we must remove the one and redo the whole storm drain system , well we knew where i dug the ditches and we found the one line on the west side of the street but we were having a problem finding the one on the east side as it was NOT where i had dug the org. ditch following the curb, while we were gone Ohio Ed did not follow the path that we had agreed on they went from the one transformer and cut across this one lot at a 45 degree angle to save some wire and never told us or anybody , while we were looking for the line the shovel operator who was nowhere near us but digging up the old culvert found it in the middle of the one houses ft yard that was under const. Well let me tell you that a John Deere 690 with a 42 inch bucket and 7600 volts makes for a pretty loud BOOOOOOM and it blew out the right side of the bucket and three teeth , yep there was a bunch of arm waven lots of shouting lots of fingure pointing and lots of people out of power as not only did it take out the bucket but that little shortcut they made also took out half a substation . Lucky no one was hurt or killed . They also redid the line like it was suppose to be .

There is a company in town that has done most of the underground stuff there for 50 years, it is amazing how far off the locator can be when you know where the line is because you put it there. I had a guy tell me there was no water line in my fence row, I dug it up with the second tile spade full of dirt.(6 inch line)

It's hard to believe a utility would bury a cable only four inches deep. It's even more unlikely the locator missed a hot line barely below the surface. Do you know the history of your home? I'd say there's a good chance the line you found was a temporary service, and the real cable is close to where the locator marked it.

I was doing a job and called for them to locate a
fiber optic cable on the site, they flagged it said
it could be 3 to 24 inches deep. The first thing I
did with the dozer was push off an old pile of brush
from utility company cutting for overhead lines,
there lay the fiber optic cable right on top of the
ground only luck it didn't get in the dozer tracks.
This is in old field easy digging why wasn't it
buried?

My Uncle could tell the direction of water veins and their size.I saw positive proof when I helped him dig a well.I can dowse water,my brother in law cant.

who buries a power line 4 inches ????

I to had a major problem with miss dig. My boss and I were going to dig a basement in a sub development and we knew there was a MAIN POWER FEED FOR THE WHOLE SUB running thru this property some where. Miss dig came and did there thing and be fore he left my boss asked him if he was 1000% sure. Locator said yep,the house was already laid out so the boss started the farthest away from said markings with in 2 scoops of the bucket me being the ground man GOT the scare of my life.WE FOUND THE MAIN POWER!!!!!! It was in between the teeth of the bucket and he went down 6' of it with out breaking the coating. The boss said he saw me turn white as a ghost and he knew to stop . The power company came out and had to shut the power grid down and dislodge the power line. All said and done the line was only 45' off from where it was suppose to be. The main print they had on file for it showed it wasn't there but where it was marked. We found out later the contractor for the power company cut corners and ran it where he wanted. I still believe to this day I had 20yrs of my life scared out of me.

Don't feel too bad, while working at the Mitchell Power Plant near Moundsville, W.V. this past spring, the contractor hydroexcavated the spot and the augercast driller drilled a 24" hole directly into 2 34.5KV lines(34,500 volts). The line was on the prints and were down 10' but the contractor only excavated down 6', don't know why, they couldn't explain it either. No one was hurt but there was a BIG potential for someone to have died that day. So you see, it can happen even on the power company property. Glad you weren't hurt. Keith

James Randi has a million dollar check waiting for any dowser who can prove his "gift". Nobody has collected it yet. Sounds like your family could be coming into some serious money.
James Randi Million Dollar Challenge

Last Saturday evening I ran into some old neighbor friends at the local winery. She told me of a grade school classmate of ours works for the "The Lady of Snows Shrine" in Belleville IL. He and two other foreman were working on electrical maintenance. The two foreman told him the power was off and he could proceed with is maintenance. When he stuck his screwdriver into the power distribution box he found out the power was not off. It burned his face and arms very badly I was told. A person always needs to double check and make sure power and or stored energy devices are discharged & locked out. ALWAYS !!!!!

Tony is right! when the 1 call guys show up around here they do the inductive method (just put the transmitter over the wire) Much room for errors here. I do line locating and fault finding, whenever I can get a direct connect the accuracy goes way up
Andy

Constantly ran into that kind of situation. Com ED here hires Northern Il. Gas or private contractors to trench for them and they get paid by the lineal foot. Northern Illinois Gas was worse and the baddest of them all was Comcast. but I never paid ANT of their bills for cut wires.

A quote from an oldtimer " I don't believe in wiching water. But I would never put down a well without witching it first. "
joe

I worked in road construction all my life. The very best protection you can give yourself is a cheap digital camera. Take pictures of every locate, making sure you are lined up with landmarks that won't be disturbed after the digging starts. Even better, get the locate guy in some of the pictures. Also take pictures of the effort you made to hand locate the utility. One thing that always ticked me off - as soon as a cable is cut, the first utility guys on the scene will jump out with a paint can and "freshen up" their marks, sometimes moving them to make themselves look better. Then the bosses show up with a camera and take pictures of the damage, making sure the fresh paint is visible in the photos. Then you're the goat - until you whip out your own pictures of the undisturbed area. Pictures have been the decider at least a dozen times in my life.

I just had natural gas installed in a house I own. They quoted putting the meter where the propane entered the house. I took a look at all the utilities that came in on that side, went to the other side of the house and nothing was there. I told them to put it on that side, ended up being a shorter run for the main gas line (saved me significant $$$, just had to run about 50 ft of black pipe in the crawl space instead of 5). Miss Dig came out and there were flags all over the side they originally wanted to use. None on the side I picked. Sure saved them time in hand digging as well.

BTW, took pix and measurements of EXACTLY where they put the gas line for future reference.

I used to locate for a major long distance phone co on trans continental fiber optic lines and the signal/tone was applied for locating at the nearest regen or main station and my locater only saw that signal. It was fairly accurate on depth finder setting also. All the cable that we put in had warning tape about a foot above the cable.

Some years ago I got a contract to replace a fuel tank at the County Sheriff's building so I called for a locator. He came out and located all the lines on the other side of the building and assured me that was all. I made him stay for the first few bucket load and on the third load I came up with all the alarm phone lines in the whole county. Hundreds of them. Wow was that exciting. Good thing he was there. I felt like an idiot to begin with but at least I didn't have to pay for the twenty wire splicers that appeared and hour later.

I know that everyone doesnt have this ability to know.... But when wife and I built our house I was out everyday to check on things...in the process I took note of ALL undergound stuff.. sewer, wires, water etc. So I have them drawn out on a google earth map of my place.. including the ones I have put in myself.. Comes in handy and I KNOW where all are.. plan to post in shed when I move or die for the next home owner..

I was working in the area, and recall when the below incident happened, pile driving contractor, was installing piles for a new building at Newark Airport, and literally drove a pile right through high voltage lines, below in an electrical duct bank. hhat a fiasco, the article below describes what happened.

I worked full time as an equipment operator for several years in the site work, excavation/foundation and or underground utility field, and one thing I hated the most was dealing with existing underground utilities, especially power. Always make the call to "call before you dig" and all the rest, even then its never a guarantee, so you really have to make sound judgement in the field, hand dig, use methods to work around and expose things. One outfit whom I worked for, doing work for a large G.C. had superintendent that always requested me for delicate work, he used to say, "that kid is careful and knows what he is doing" and I would say, that might be the case, but theres still a lot more to it than that. You just never know, I am a big fan of hand digging when near or close to something, always have a good laborer with an attentive eye in the hole.

Properly done as built drawings, caution tape buried above utilities, bedding sand so you can see the change in color, or how many other things sure do help, but you can just never assume anything is where someone says it is until you see it, and how you get to that point can be very interesting. As an operator, it can be very stressful, knowing what that bucket tooth will tear into or hook onto.

While a superintendent on a new 3500'-0" steel dual temp line from a co-generation plant to (5) 23 story buildings in Brooklyn NY, we worked around a lot of dangerous underground utilities. One afternoon while excavating for the new lateral or feed lines to one of the buildings, there was a 6" gas line in the excavation wall, and the cut was starting to collapse, every one of us nearby ( thinking back now) foolishly jumped in the support that line by hand until we could quickly get support under it, the line was some kind of steel, metal nothing that would flex, close call !
Newark Airport

A little off topic here but I'm looking for a water line thru my yard. We witched it and I marked it, then just out of curiosity I rented a locator. The marks are a foot off we'll see who's closest when I dig it. I have both marks measured from my machine shed so they don't get lost. I don't have a back hoe so I'm going to dig it by hand I want to put in a hydrant.

My uncle in South Dakota decided to run a water line under the road to a pasture on the other side. One call came out and said the area was clear, the digging was started. Within minutes the contractor tore up some cables that they later found out belonged to the US Air Force. Elsworth AFB somehow used them to communicate with its fleet of Minuteman 3 missles. Don't know if the Air Force kept these things secrete or the guy from one call messed up.

(quoted from post at 00:19:58 09/20/13)
[b:11a6fb3ee4]I might add that this power supply was located about a year ago, by a different person, and it was marked in almost the same spot![/b:11a6fb3ee4]

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Which spot, where you dug or where the power company said it was?

My dad had one-call out putting services into a new house in a subdivision, and hit a line. The hole was a couple inches from the edge of their margin of error and he hit it, they came out and said he was within their margin, they measure it from the edge of the paint mark, which was about 6 inches wide.

My uncle and I always doused for ditch lines, just use whatever wire we have handy. Did a lot of work at an old church camp, and wow, you never knew what you were going to find. Old steel water lines rusted shut, gas lines every which way, but somehow no electric.

Hi Ive never done water myself just lines and pipes buried .
one winter a guy I worked for was looking for a culvert buried under his road and 5ft of snow in the ditch.
He wanted to make sure the end was free from old rushes and grass before a fast thaw.
I walked the lane end, first thing I found was the line of the culvert , then walked another 5 feet towards the highway and found where the underground phone cable was trenched in.
He could not believe I could pick them both up, with 2 bent welding rods. He gave me the shovel to dig the ends out. "Not my job buddy" I found the culvert, you wanted it you dig it! L.O.L.
Regards Robert

My uncle did backhoe work. Back in the 70's and 80's. He swore he could "witch" water. I watched him many times use two bent, brass brazing rods to locate underground water lines.

I never saw enough solid proof to 100% convince me he was right. So I am still skeptical.

Gene

Had same problem with city water main. I got them out there after I discovered the mark was 5 ft off. They told me their mark could be up to 10 ft off and that I should hand dig.

So they can just drive by and throw paint out the window.