Call before you dig

[Up to the Axles]

re: 811 response
I went through this on the Olympic Peninsula. In WA, you CYA by filing a 811 ticket; the utilities have ?5? days to respond. One locater did the Comcast, a different one did the PSE power. No one ever showed up for the Centel phones. I later heard the one locater had but one guy for the entire Peninsula.

Check your state laws; I thought all 48 in CONUS were on board with the concept that once you file the ticket, it's the utilities's responsibility from then on. Their responsiveness varies widely.

When WMATA was building the Metrorail Silver line to Dulles Airport, they obviously had lots of locates. There was a Washington Post article on it. They hit LOTS of unmarked things, and often could get no responses.

On the other hand, that project runs along a fiber route for the Intelligence Community; connecting NRO in Centerville VA, the Agency in Langley, NPIC in DC and NSA at Ft. Meade, as well as many other less-known folks. The article said roughly "When we hit that, there were 3 black Suburbans on site within a few minutes..."

 

[jigs_n_fixtures]

My brother and his wife both worked for the phone company. His dog died, the Saturday before Super Bowl Sunday. He got up in the morning to bury the dog in his back yard, and started digging a hole in the frozen ground. He was running into a lot of tree roots, and was digging away with a a digging bar. At about three feet down he found a "big root" and hit until he noticed the colored wires in the hole.

He went in to check, and his phone still worked, so he called it in. While he was waiting for the line crew to get there to make the repairs, he put up his largest wall tent, put the tent stove in, and fired it up. Then ran an extension cord out and put the spare TV out there to watch the game.

The line crew got there, helped him finish the hole and bury the dog, and then spent three hours fixing the damage, and watching the game in shirt sleeves.

He never got a bill.

 

[Up to the Axles]

Yikes!! My cousin used to weld on active pipelines. It always amazes me that they can do that.

No problem if there is enough flow; they also weld on 80,000 bbl storage tanks of gasoline. BUT they make sure the weld location had a few feet of gasoline above it for cooling.

 

[WinterDeere]

My wife worked for the phone company and my son works there now. They deal with fiber optic all the time. That picture of the cable laying on the ground is not a major fiber optic cable, it’s much to small. That doesn’t mean it’s not some kind of important cable though.

I spent many years of my early career designing fiberoptic transmitters and transponders, and my wife has spent 30 years in the manufacture of these components.

All long-haul fiber is 7 - 9 micrometer diameter, as in Ø.007 to Ø.009 millimeters... microscopically tiny. What you see when you look at "fiber" is the many layers of protective sheathing and jackets applied, to prevent men with shovels from damaging it, and that can really be any size suitable to the application.

There are larger multi-mode fibers, they run around Ø.063 - Ø.125 mm. Still very tiny, roughly the diameter of a human hair, but they don't work for long-haul networking.

One of the most difficult jobs on earth, as an engineer, is steering a laser into the end of a Ø.007mm diameter fiber, as the angle of incidence must be tightly controlled for minimum reflection / maximum coupling, and everything moves with temperature. The edge-emitting lasers used in these long-haul systems are generally very tiny, like .008 x .010 x .004 inch, they will literally blow away if someone sneezes around an open package of them. Dissipating just 40 - 100 mW into a package that small, they run incredibly hot, and heat up the substrate to which they're bonded, causing everything to expand and coupling between the laser and fiber end to drift. It's a total sh*t show, to the point where it's a miracle any of it works as well as it does.

 

[Jstpssng]

Don't get lines located, this could be your story.

I got bored. What happened?

 

[WinterDeere]

I watched way more than 3 seconds, and nothing has happened yet. False advertising!

Sounds like it was a pretty terrible accident. They hit a pipeline, assumed it was a buried rock, and commenced trying to pull it out of the ground with two big farm tractors. Four men involved, and I skipped some of the details, but it sounds like only one walked away from it.

 

[RayIN]

Here in Wisconsin you are supposed to call diggers hotline before doing ANY digging, even in your garden !
So last summer I needed to dig up my 90 years old basement drain to replace it because it was plugged.
Your supposed to call 2 weeks prior to digging and I did, well the day before the digging was supposed to start diggers hotline folks hadn’t shown up so I called again, they said they would send someone out the next day, well the next day it was raining like crazy but there was a white pickup truck sitting at the end of my driveway for quite awhile, eventually he drives into my yard, I had put white stakes in my lawn to mark where I wanted to dig, so I go out in the rain to talk to him, says he is there to mark my telephone line, so I tell him I know where the telephone line is but it was disconnected nearly 20 years ago when I got a cellphone but go ahead a mark it if that’s what your supposed to do but I need the underground power line marked that what I called about. He tells me he is not authorized to mark power lines and I need to call the power company for that. So I start complaining that I called weeks ago to get the power line marked even though I know pretty well where it’s buried and it shouldn’t be any problem with my basement drain. So he feels sorry for me and marks the power line with some orange paint and some red flags it was exactly where i thought it was and no problem for my basement drain project. The next day another guy shows up to supposedly mark the underground power line but says I will have to pay to have it marked. Well I tell him it’s already marked, he says those red flags are for telephone line. I tell him there definitely ain’t no telephone line there and I ain’t paying him anything. So he leaves and a few days later we dig in the new basement drain, everything turned out well. That diggers hotline crap is another one of those crazy government involved messed up programs.

Next time, before you dig, buy some Copper Sulfate liquid if you can find it, otherwise granules, and put down a sluggish drain. Copper Sulfate will kill any roots that have grown into a drain pipe.
The downside is, it might also kill nearby trees that have roots in the drain pipe.

 

[LowellBen]

Not really a locate/digging story, but will put it out here anyway.

Years ago we lived in a subdivision where all the electric was underground. One nite a drunk clobbered the transformer that serviced our house. The utility got things all fixed up by about 3 am. But over the next several months we would lose one of the 120v legs. Utility would come out and fix it and a couple of months or so later we would lose one of the legs again.

One time I happened to be at home when the utility was there. A big ole dude in bibs came up to me and said that the line running to my house was not code compliant and that I would have to pay to have 100' of line replaced. I laughed at him and told him that the utility was responsible for all repairs up to the meter on the house. He wanted to argue about it. I told him that he could call his boss or I would. They fixed the wires at the transformer again and then left. Guess they finally fixed it correctly cause I had no problems with the power after that.

 

[Jstpssng]

I watched way more than 3 seconds, and nothing has happened yet. False advertising!

Sounds like it was a pretty terrible accident. They hit a pipeline, assumed it was a buried rock, and commenced trying to pull it out of the ground with two big farm tractors. Four men involved, and I skipped some of the details, but it sounds like only one walked away from it.

Thank you. I also watched more than three seconds. The guy kept telling about about driving and driving, thinking he was almost there, and I knew just what he was talking about. Then another guy saying the same thing... Some woman started telling about how "he" was always working but I still didn't know what happened.
At that point I realized I was only halfway through the video.


So I shut it off and listened to Led Zeppelin singing "Ramble On" instead, because it seemed fitting.

 

[Fallon]

You can't get anything useful for a residence with 10G, either. A friend was a VP at Amazon, and was upset his new apartment LAN was only 2.5Gb/s until I asked him how many mouse-clicks/second that was. He shut up.

We'll need 16K/3D television before you need that capacity. It's like buying some 500HP tractor to plow the driveway in Florida.

I'm well aware, I've been at IT engineer of various sorts for a few decades. The biggest benefit is bragging rights. Interesting fact, the web browser becomes the bottleneck for speedtest.net around 3 gigabit. If you run the app you can get to 6 gigabit or so. Iperf3 to my firewall gets to 10gig, minus the usual Ethernet overhead. I stopped caring once I proved I could get 5-6 as that was already overkill.

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