My luck....

[Mike Costello]

When I built my log home in No. Calif. Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) sent a gas crew out to run a gas line from the street to the meter. I already had the whole area USA'd and told them there was an 18" irrigation line and an 8" city water line they had to go under and to be careful. Well, you guessed it, they punctured the irrigation line which was fully charged and the flood was on! They called the local irrigation district about the problem and took off, leaving me with water threatening to flood out my home under construction. The irrigation district shut the line down and rushed pumps out to keep the water out. It took almost 4 hours to slow the water down. It was close, but we made it!
It took a few days to dry things out around the break and the irrigation boys began their repairs. Then the unbelievable happened! They managed to break into the city water line which couldn't be shut down and the flood was on again. More frantic pumping and repairs. The water level came within an inch of flooding my garage and living area, but once again we made it!
We had a meeting of the mnds with PG&E and they tried to say I never USA'd the area. I showed them the markings on the street. Their foreman said he couldn't see them because the street was dusty. The irrigation folks asked him if he had ever heard of a broom! PG&E got the bill!

 

[ultrarunner]

Mistakes happen... it just galls me when they try and pass the blame!

 

[Marlowe]

Many years ago I purchased the home I'm living in now in a relatively new neighborhood. When I moved in I took notice of where the underground wiring was run and noticed that the phone lines were ran underground about a foot outside of my property line in the back yard. So, a few months into living here I decided to erect the fence and proceeded to dig holes for the posts. Along about post number twelve I ran into a tough root from one of the many pine trees. Once I got through it I noticed some shiny material in the dirt pile. Copper. Not a good sign. The phone line had wandered a bit into my side of the line. The whole neighborhood was without phone service for a while until they could get it fixed, but they didn't give me much grief over it.

 

[MikeD74T]

In the late 60's I was just out of HS & working as a laborer for a local construction company. Did primarily water & sewer lines but also had a horizontal boring machine for putting pipe under busy roads, railroads, etc., where digging would be a major disruption.
The machine sat in a pit dug beside the road & pushed a sleeve, up to 48" diameter, with an auger inside that pulled the dirt back to the pit. Working along fine and suddenly we were surrounded with military, local & state police! We had severed a main communications cable going to the Strategic Air Command at the local airbase. Fortunately other than a 3 day delay there was no penalty as we were at the approved depth. Apparently the top secret cable, which we didn't know about, was deeper than expected. It was said that the bill for repair & downtime was over $1 million, at a time when you could buy a new Jaguar XKE for $6500. MikeD74T