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Warning: the 811 markout crew in San Antonio taught me one thing about utility lines that stuck
I was standing on a job site near Bulverde Road about a year ago when the locator from the 811 crew flagged me down. He had a can of orange paint and a little handheld receiver, and he told me something that caught me off guard. He said that in his 11 years of doing markouts, the number one cause of hit lines that he saw was not old maps or missing records, it was homeowners and even crews using a shovel within 24 inches of a paint mark. That 24 inch buffer is the whole ballgame, apparently. He showed me a spot where someone nicked a gas service line digging a fence post hole just 30 inches away from the flag. That detail made me rethink how we prep our own crews on small residential jobs. Does anyone here run a set rule on hand digging distance, or do you mostly just trust the paint marks?
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