Underground Construction - July 2017 - 18

3
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By Scott Finley

Magic Numbers

For Underground Construction, Maintenance

Take a moment and flip back to
read the title of this magazine.
It's Underground Construction, and
deals with - well, underground
construction. Water, sewer, gas,
telecom and electric; that pretty
much covers all the bases. It also
covers a lot of miles. According
to the Common Ground Alliance,
there are around 100 billion feet
of underground utility lines buried
in the United States. That equals
around 19 million miles. Put in
perspective, the distance from
the earth to the moon is about
238,000 miles, and the speed of
light is 186,000 miles per second.
If all of the buried utilities in the
United States were laid end to end,
it would take a beam of light over
a minute and a half to go from one
end to the other.
That's over a football field in
length of buried utilities for every man, woman and child in the
nation. And every six minutes,
one of those lines - possibly one
of yours - is hit because someone
excavated without calling 811 first.
The chance of causing damage is
reduced to less than one percent
when a call to 811 is made prior to
the dig. But not everyone around
your buried lines is a model citizen.
Over 38 million people will put
a shovel, backhoe, excavator, trencher, auger or other tool into the
ground this year without getting
buried lines located first. That's 38
million chances for a gas explosion,
a petroleum products spill, cutting
off water to a hospital - it's all happened before.
According to the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state agency
charged with monitoring pipelines
in that state, Texas has the largest
pipeline infrastructure in the nation - more than 439,771 miles of
pipeline representing about

ucononline.com

one-sixth of the total pipeline
mileage of the entire United
States. Texas' pipelines are divided into the categories of natural gas and LP-gas distribution
lines (more than 148,167 miles),
hazardous liquid and natural gas
transmission lines (more than
66,382 miles), intrastate production and gathering lines leaving
lease lines (more than 175,928
miles), and interstate lines (45,173
miles).
That's a lot of stuff in the
ground. Some of it probably belongs to you.

Keeping it safe
How do you keep it all safe? A big
chunk of your pipeline safety and
awareness falls into your relationship with the 811 call centers that
range along your right of ways.
811 is the national "call before you
dig" number to get underground
utilities located prior to a dig. In
every state the call is free, and so
is the subsequent locating of the
underground facilities, shown by
marking them with either multicolored flags or spray paint.
Those flag colors also mean
different things.
It doesn't matter where you are
when the call to 811 is made; it's
automatically sent to the nearest
811 call center. (The full list of
state 811 call centers can be found
at: call811.com.) As you move out
of one center's territory you enter
that of another, in much the same
way aircraft are passed from one
air traffic control center to the
next.
It wasn't always that way,
though. The 811 number has only
been active for about 10 years as a
national entity.
Here is part of the FCC press
Underground Construction July 2017

http://www.call811.com http://www.ucononline.com

Underground Construction - July 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Underground Construction - July 2017