Locate before landscaping

As SciGuy recently pointed out, we experienced the coldest stretch of February weather since 1895!!  Hopefully that's all behind us and now we can focus on warmer-weather activities.  'Tis the season to begin landscaping - replacing that which was killed by the cold, and adding new plants to our yards. 

There's something you should know before you even start, however: we have a utility notification law in Texas and it's in your best interest to abide by it.  This is not a generic regulatory regurgitation I'm about to do here - some of my personal observations on this topic may surprise you, so please bear with me while I explain.

If you check your property survey, you'll likely see "UE" or similar acronyms somewhere around your property boundaries.  The utility easement is where underground lines for electricity, natural gas, phone, cable TV, data (high-speed internet), and possibly other service lines are buried. 

The most common utility companies participate in notification cooperatives, and that is true in Texas.  Name changes over the years have resulted in the Texas811 system, the URL for which which still goes by the older name "Digtess".

Logo excerpted from http://www.digtess.org/

See that shovel under the "1" in the "811"?  This is probably our most common "call before you dig" locator service.  Not all utilities participate in this specific cooperative, and a membership explanation is beyond the scope of this post (check the http://www.digtess.org/ website for limitations).  But this is usually who you contact first when you want utilities marked for you prior to digging in a residential yard. 

The law was primarily designed to apply to mechanized excavation projects involving heavy-equipment or deep digging.  However, experience has taught me that, even if you're only using your sweat-equity shovel, you should still call these guys for reasons including (but not limited to) the following:

• Your utility lines might not be WHERE you assume they are.  Given that utility companies have a type of right-of-way in the easements that run through your yard, it's a good idea to locate the lines so that you won't plant right on top of them (at least, that's my theory).  That way, hopefully you'll minimize the chances of having your most important landscaping elements disturbed later on if the utilities need to access their lines.  In order to best avoid them, of course, you have to know exactly where they are.  Case in point:

This is the result I got upon notifying Digtess on a backyard landscaping project.  In this photo, orange is data cable, red is electrical, and yellow is natural gas. 

Check this out: The data trench does NOT align with the data junction box, which is just barely visible in the upper right corner of the photo - in fact, the line is about ten feet off the corresponding row of boxes.  Many people would assume that if they see a row of utility boxes, the underground lines must be right there under those boxes, or beside them.  Not necessarily true.  In this case, it appears as if the data company may have copped a spot in the trench that the natural gas company dug, despite having originally set their box row some distance away from where that trench ended up.  But don't accept my theory for this jumble - I'm not really sure what the heck they were thinking.  I'm just glad I did the Digtess notification before I started planting shrubs here.

• Your utility lines might not be AS DEEP AS you assume they are.  This is particularly true of your own service lines - the connectors that branch from the main lines and run to your house.  I like to meet with utility locator personnel when they are actually standing in my yard with their cans of spray paint and ask them to also help me find my service lines, because some of them have told me in the past that they are NOT required to mark service lines - just trunk lines.  I've had locator personnel be very reluctant to help with this, so I try to get them to comment "off the record" about the location of service lines (every bit of info helps).  Depending on the individual property circumstances, service lines can be considerably shallower than the main lines, potentially shallow enough for you to hit with just a hand shovel.
• Your utility lines might be MORE EXPENSIVE than you assume they are.   One of my neighbors replaced our common fence at my previous residence, and when the old fence came out, my electrical service line got damaged in the process.  The cheapest of three bids to get that line re-dropped was sixteen hundred dollars!!!!!  Ouch!!  That ended up being much more expensive than my portion of the danged fence!!!  Moral of the sub-story: You do NOT want to damage one of your service lines by accident!! 

So there you have some scoop on digging - by no means a comprehensive evaluation, but enough to get you pointed in a good direction.  Call Digtess at least two working days before you start landscaping or fence work, and meet with the locator personnel who come to your yard.  Know where your lines are, and how deep they are, including the service lines that run to your house.  You don't want to injure either yourself or your wallet because you were not informed.

Of course, anything you place or plant in an easement is subject to possible later damage by utility companies if they need to access their lines, but that is a topic for a future post.