Plows and Underground Obstacles

As an aside to the question I just posted, does anyone have any stories (scary, humorous, informative, whatever) involving plows or other implements hitting below-ground objects?

Mark W. in MI

Well, not a plow, but once our neighbor pulled up a natural gas line with a deep ripper. Brought it right up with him apparently. Not sure what ever became of it though. Toby.

Snagging a 4 inch oak root stops a 350U in about 5 inches. Kissing the steering wheel is made mandatory.
A neighbor (buddy of mine in &th grade) hit a 19 foot long 6' diameter aluvial bolder with a chissle plow on a SM. His dad spent more than 1000$ diging it up and rolling it into a fense row. Burrying it 20" deeper would have been near free. Jim

We kicked up big rock plowing one spring when I was a kid. Dad got the old 300 utility with the loader bucket while the rest of us plowed. I noticed when he hauled the rock out the field he went in reverse. When I asked why later he said the back wheels wouldn't stay on the ground going forward!:^)

Deere had an attachment that disengaged the hand clutch on the tractor when the trailer plow hit an obstacle. The plow tongue was spring loaded, so the plow would drop back, pulling a chain which snapped the hand clutch back with a snap. Tractor operators's knee then stopped the clutch handle in it's rearward travel. Most of those were disabled soon after. Did I mention that most often, the plow point was broken anyway?


A few years back, my son was plowing in a field that had been under cultivation for many years. Caught the plow, on a rock. jerked to a stop. Got off the tractor grabbed a shovel and started digging around the stone. Stoneturned out to be shaped like a big russet potato on end, with a ledge on one side at the top. We found several broken plow points onder that ledge. Some were not from my dad's plow, that he used from 1947 till he retired in 1970. I would have recognized the distinctive plow points that it used. So that rock had been giving farmer's fits for more than half a century! We finally dug it out, pulled it off, leaving a hole 5 feet deep. No wonder it wasn't moving!

I've plowed up all kinds of stuff over the years. This year I plowed up a crank that would fit my M, a plow point I lost years ago when my JD plows had Syracus bottoms and a bunch of anchor bolts. This in addition to 3 huge rocks and many more that only shook my teeth and did not plow up. Worst thing I ever found was a broken off metal fence post. Those old post break off and leave spears for a tip. Found that with a new front tire on my H.

Son was plowing a couple years ago ,and on a subsequent round, noticed something sticking out of the ground. Hopped off and picked it up. Was a lug wrench for a John Deere tractor. Since my dad had a '47 B, bought new, it had to be from that tractor. I was born in '46, and I never remember us having that wrench, always had a hardware store replacement we used. So that wrench had been burried for somewhere around 50 years!

When I bought my property it was all pasture so I decided to plow it all up. I walked it over the period of 2 weeks just to make sure I didn't miss anything. After I got 2/3ds of it done I found a house foundation with a MX180and a 5 furrow plow. It stopped me pretty quick and destroyed a moldboard. This summer when I was plowing I was lucky enough to find an old well. I have now sectioned off part of my field because it must have been used as a dump at some point in time.

I plowed up a gas line once too. Stopped the plowing for a while while I made a fast repair. Line was owned by us, and fed the house from a well on the back of the place. At that time well was owned by us.

I lost a grease gun off a 706 plowing a field to seed down to hay. Five years later plowing the hayfield under the grease gun reapeared. It's a little rusty on the outside but still works.
Lots of horse shoes.

When the JD 2510 was not very old and Dad was plowing with the three bottom JD semi-mounted plow, he ruined the 15.5x38 furrow tire, with a piece of broken plow point, lodged next to a rock.
Prior to that the plowing outfit was an AC WD45 w/three bottom semi mounted plow. I was young enough I didn't run it much. One memorable time the plow caught so hard and the hand clutch release mechanism snapped so quickly I was slammed into the steering wheel. Before I knew it the clutch lever bounced so hard on the rubber stop it RE- ENGAGED! I was nearly thrown off the seat. Apparently the plow had by then bounced around the rock.
I was knifing anhydrous into corn on a rocky hillside with an AC 185 when for some reason the bolts on the knife didn't shear, and the center big coil spring broke. A jagged piece of the spring steel coil landed on the hyd. console next to me. I believe it would have put a hole in my skull.

I found a nest of turtle eggs once. Lifted the soil off without breaking a single one.

'bout 2 years ago, plowed up my brother's Phone and Dsl line. He was not pleased! Would'nt have hit it if it had been buried to code (16"), but verizon would rather repair something 100 times, than do it right the first time!

The underground power to our pivot sprinkler was a little shallow near the tower. Partner had a different idea of south than me and plowed up the electric line. Never touched the west side though.

Not a plow but a Ditch Witch. I cut a huge telephone line (about as big around as my leg). Knocked out phone service in the north half of two counties. I had called before I dug. Boy Bellsouth got mad but they fixed it the same. They were gonna try to charge me $8,000 but luckily I had the guys name that came out when I called the Call Before You Dig numberand he took care of it for me. Good times!

brother was plowing on a farm the inlaws had rented .....December,late at night/early morning,snowing making last pass on the headland up near one of the two houses on the farm....catches the lid of the septic tank,gives it a 1/4 turn breaks in two pieces one of them in the tank. Holy CRAP pretty well covers that. Put some plywood and baled straw over it till spring when a new lid was installed. Changed the field boundary too. Bob

Many years ago grandpa plowed up half of a dummy bomb that the air force used for training exercises. His neighbor some years earlier had one drop through the roof of his hog shed!

I know grandpa hit a stump while plowing one day with his WD and about threw him off the tractor... Also recall him saying he dropped the front pedestal in a groundhog burrow and it killed the tractor when it went in.

I found an old ball hitch in one of the water gaps after a fresh Spring plowing about 10 years ago. The thing had fallen off of an old combine probably 20 years before that. Rusty as the dickens, too.

Just finished plowing a 1/4 mile stretch of former fenceline that was solid hedges and mulberry trees that were pushed out. I used a 630 Deere with a mounted 4X14's plow to turn up or turn under the little saplings the bulldozer bent over. Worked pretty good on the saplings but I was under-gunned when it came to the bigger roots. If I hit a root halfway up on the shin the plow bottom would not trip and it would stop the tractor dead in second gear. I didn't even have enough time to grab the clutch. It was a slow agonizing process for sure. If only I had a big one bottom root plow and a LOT more tractor or even a crawler. The only treasures I turned up was two broken off steel posts. Jim

While I know chicken houses ain't a good thing to talk about down that way a buddy of mine went round and round with Bell South about 12 years ago. He tried and tried to get them to come out and move a line or burry it deeper before he started the dirt work. They never would. He got into it with a dozer. Went to court over it, had to show where he had called and called. They never burried it any deeper like he asked on the hillside where he took dirt from leave'n the line about 6" deep. The next spring while getting ready to set tobacco he hit it with a turn'n plow, disk, and then again with a Triple K. They never would burry it, they just spliced it and left it on top of the ground. He had to bush hog the splices twice before they would burry it.

Dave

Grandpa put his false teeth in his bib overall pocket, they fell out and got plowedunder, my uncle found them 2 years later while cultivating corn, Grandpa went back to using them as he didn't like the ones that replaced them. This story made the regional newspaper. He's been gone since 1990 and this happened in the mid 80's.

in 1986 bought a 40 acre field .. had terrible dead furrows , so I plowed them back in when i plowed the entire field ,.. had Johnson grass riZhomes big as a broom handle . ANYWAY , Lost my Waterjug off the tractor and plowed it under ,, Some 5 yrs later of NO-tilling ,, the jug had worked its way to the surface and still had clean water in it !.. except for a disc blade slice on the outside it was still a decent tractor water jug ...

When I was about 15 I plowed under a billfold I had won for the best 4-H electrical project in the county. I plowed a few acres backwards, never found it. It turned up two years later, but my farm drivers license had expired by then.

Had an uncle years ago kept hitting a rock with the plow. He dug around it with the loader and gave up. Told the neighbor lady she could have it if she payed to have it removed. One excavator and two D8's later and she had her rock. Estimated to be around 200 ton!

I had a long buried 20 ft. log chain hook to the last bottom of my 4 bottom plow once. 4 or 5 years ago I found a drag chain from a drill while plowing. It was the same field my father was planting wheat the day I was born. I often wonder if it was lost on my birthday some forty years earlier.

well now this isnt a plowing story but all will get a kick out of it.
went over to son in laws house to help trim some trees an remove them. took the 3020 an loader an back blade with us, sounds good.
started out good, until i took down a telephone pole, wasnt a big one, should have come down anyhow. i hit the brase wire, snapping it, pole mostly rotten, it come down, lines an all. didnt hit anything or anyone.
next he dropped part of branch on the power line goin into house tearing it off the house, man those through alot of fire when they come off to.
daughter is not a happy camper by this time.
next decided to blade down where they had bured a waterline in the yard with the blade on the tractor, did i tell ya they had just had dish put in also, ya know they dont bury them lines very deep.
daughter is not ------ anymore she is mad. son an i decided it was time we loaded the tractor an headed home. real quick. we hid in the shop for a while, cause i was sure she was on the phone with my wife.
strange she didnt ask us to come back an finish help picking up the yard.
johndeeregene

A few years back the power company was moving poles and lines for a road widening project near me. They were right in front of a big scrap yard that had not just one main power line feeding it, but two. Funny thing, no one knew where the second service drew off of, just that there was a meter. While drilling the hole for a new pole the auger hit the second line. I didn"t see it but reports, from a friend who had a shop beside the scrap yard, were that the resulting blast nearly blew the auger out of the ground and the guy running it was stumbling around in the road, singed, with smoke coming off of him like something you"d see in the cartoons. Fortunately the operator was only "close" to the blast and wasn"t seriously hurt, he just singed all of his exposed hair......and needless to say they found out that day where the second power line fed from.
Dad watched a guy swing a crane into a cross country high voltage line while showing him a problem with the swing mechanism. Don"t know what all got knocked out power wise but the sparks lit a large broom straw field on fire. Dad said the result was red and blue lights, and sirens coming from everywhere in about two minutes, followed closely by pickup and bucket trucks from the power company.
Personally I haven"t hit anything underground but I once bumped an overhead line with the boom on an excavator mounted rock drill. It had been parked under the lines and I didn"t realize how close to the lines I was until I tracked the machine to one side to get away from a silt fence and heard a pop. Knocked out power to a neighborhood for about two hours until they could get a guy out to check the line and replace the fuse that I blew out. Fortunately all I had done was momentarily cross the hot and neutral lines when a hydraulic line on the drill boom bumped them. Nothing came down and all it did was burn a small spot on the neutral line which was easily repaired with a splice. Never did see a bill for the job. I always suspected they were either, one just glad I was honest and called about the problem, because otherwise they would have never spotted the cause on their own, and/or two that I showed the repair guy where the problem was, and then spent the whole time BS"ing with the two supervisors in pickups that showed up. As a reslut they knew that although I was technically at fault for hitting it that I was just the mechanic and the machine wasn"t mine therefore I hadn"t parked the thing in a position to where the line was apt to be hit by someone working without a second guy for a spotter. Sometimes you just get lucky.....it could have been the 44,000 volt lines running across the field 25 yards away. Then I would have knocked out power to a whole town and I imagine it would have been EXPENSIVE...

I have to admit that we've gotten pretty bad about that over the years. No excuses. Guys have been laid off, in new construction we have the subcontractors that lay in Edison's stuff drop ours in the trenches with theirs, so we don't have many ditch witches to do anything anymore, and the comapany doesn't want to do it anyway because it takes time and money. Is a pretty lousy way of doing business, and thats pretty much how it goes. I guess that the powers to be figure that the odds are with them by not even sending guys out to mark with the locators that locate for all utilities at one time...gas, water, cable, phone all at once. And as far as splices go, I've seen some money savers up front that are expensive on the backend, big time, especially if its air core buried and the cheap pieces of garbage splice leak, and they will. But, someone figures they are doing the company a favor by saving money up front by purchasing cheap splice enclosures that had no business being made in the first place. No excuses from me. Its about good looking numbers on colored pie charts and bad service anymore.

However, speaking of bulldozers and buried cables. Years back I get a repair for a customer where all of heir lines are dead. I drive through a construction site at the bottom of a hill where they are rerouting a road to build a super market, drive up the hill past another Bell guy sitting at a pedestal toning cable pairs. I go into the building and test for dialtone on the underground pairs, nothing on any pair. That aint good. I go outside to the fella at the pedestal and tell him I aint got nothing and ask him if he knows anything about it. He says he's been waiting over an hour for another guy down the hill to send him tone on pairs but aint getting nothing. No radios, cellphones, nothing, just waiting for tone on pairs for over an hour, getting nothing. OK, I've got nothing, he's got nothing, so I get in the truck and drive down through the construction site to a fella at a pedestal sending tone up the hill to a fella that aint getting it. Hmm? I walk over to where they are rerouting the road and there's the problem. A dozer leveling out the foundation for a new road and a 100 pair cable torn to shreds on one side, and a 100 pair torns to shreds on the other side, and nothing connecting them in between. Well, I figure I found everyones problem, so when the fella on the dozer shoots down past me to make another pass, I stop him and point to the shredded cable ends with about 40' missing in between, so he shuts off the dozer, climbs down, says, "I didn't do it", and walked away. Personally, i didn't care. It got fixed.

Now...unrelated, but you wanna see what happens when a demo company drops a pretty short and small smoke stack at an old fossil into a 118KV grid two or three days ago in Ohio? The old stack was just tall enough to reach it when it fell the wrong way. I sent it to my power plant buddies and they laughed like heck. Sure put a hurt on the demo company's profit margin, you can bet. Take a look at this. The pictures are good, but the video is better. Lucky no one got killed.

Mark
Check This Screwup Out

Four years ago i decided to turn over a 25 acre tract of ground. It was trash ground and i was going to plant orchard grass in it. It was sandwiched between the state road and a few houses. Had the underground utility line marker come out. He went along the field and then across. Said there was a water line, telephone line buried alongside the road within the state right of way. Cable was attached to the utility poles. No problem I wasnt plowing close enough to the road anyways.

I start plowing, after about 3 hours some guy comes running across the field waving his arms. I stop he says his cable is out and so is his neighbors cable. Long story sort the fella along with several of his neighbors had at some point illegaly acquired cable by hooking into it at the road and buried it accross the field to there houses.

My Uncle in Ohio was subsoiling a field on his farm two years ago. He cut a cross country fiber optic phone line. It ripped it into in several places across that fourth. They tried to charge him $10,000 per hour it was down. He got out the contract for easement they had signed when it was installed. That stated that all cable was to be four foot or deeper. The phone company checked the cables on the rest of his farm and found that in many places it was not much over a foot deep. It seems that a sub-contractor cut corners. The phone company dug right beside the cable with a track hoe and placed the cable at four plus feet.

Hope your uncle got paid damages for the extra digging.

We didnt have phone for a week because my Dad pulled up an unknown line with a big chisel plow. The next week, my uncle hit one of the boxes where they join the lines together on the side of the road. they hadnt cut around it in so long it wasnt viible, and he just forgot it was there and "tapped" it with the bushhog. I barely missed chopping up a dead body once, but he was in the ditch.

I dug some test holes in a large lot that a parking garage was to be built,in down town Charleston. I left the machine there a few days and when I returned they told me that they had found an unexploded civil war cannon ball in the edge of one of the holes. Never did get to see it.
Ron

Friend was chiseling on my place with a JD 720 diesel when he hung a big underground boulder. Tractor stood straight up before stalling. As the tractor came back down, it was running the engine backwards. That engine cranked and ran backwards till he shut it down.
My son was subsoiling in the same field very early one morning and woke me up hearing the 620 JD. Jumped up and put on pants and rushed up there to warn him of our phone line at the end of the field. He stopped and lifted the plow. I saw a chunk of the phone line on the plow, shook my head and went back home.
Richard

The tenants who eventually who took our farm over cut through our mains water pipe with a subsoiler in another neighbours field they were working in. Then some time later they cut through the phone cable even though we warned them about it . When British Telecom came to repair it the guy told me that had the new tenants informed them they were going to subsoil that field, BT would have traced the line for them free of charge, as it was it was going to cost them a fortune to have it repaired. Not long after that we heard they had cut through the main sewage pipe from the next village.

I rememeber that!

For years every spring I'd hook something in my garden. Thought it was part of an old foundation. One year I decided to dig it up. It was a beautiful marble tombstone, lying on it's side. Name on it was Harvey W. Johnson. Died in 1892?? Told my wife I was going to change my name to Harvey Johnson and she could use it when I kicked off.

Harvey

Did some plowing for my brother this spring in a small peice he rented for pumpkins. The feild was cow pasture for years, and then was just sitting for the last 5 or 10 years. We plowed up an old vacume cleaner and a couple other oddities while plowing.

In our own feild, I've plowed up a grease gun I lost chopping corn years before, and a hammer in the same feild.

Donovan from Wisconsin

Years ago we moved our farm from NH to NY and I was plowing the field next to the barn when I snagged an underground phone line that fed the whole neighborhood, probably could've found a better way to meet the neighbors :lol:

The old adage, waste not want not.

A guy built an addition onto his house in an existing developement. "Miss utility" was called and marked out where everything underground was. I had to dig a trench with my backhoe from the addition out to daylight at the curb for drainage from the addition. Anyhow, I was digging parallel with the marks and about 6 feet from them. I hit telephone, cable, electric. we called "Miss utility" and the gas and electric company. The guy from Miss utility sat in his truck looking at microfilm. The gas and electric company guy said to me, "take one more scoop out to make a step for us to get into the trench" so I did and hit the gas line...ba ha ha ha...obviously the marks were in the wrong place.