Can we bore here today? Every drill day starts there.

It depends on the ticket type and the state. In Michigan a standard ticket gives you 21 days, so on smaller work you are watching expiration dates constantly. Project tickets run 180 days, which is what we use on bore projects, and renewals rarely become the problem. The tradeoff is that a 180-day ticket collects revisions, and after five or six of them the revision history is what you have to keep straight, not the clock.

A smaller project for us is around 16,000 linear feet, and that usually breaks into 20 to 30 tickets depending on how we split them. Rural work runs longer tickets, roughly half a mile each, so there are fewer of them and they are easier to work with. Urban work is closer to 10 addresses per ticket, so the count climbs fast. We do not call them all in at once. We call the first third, then the second, then the last, in the order we think they can be completed and at the speed the crews are moving.

On the public one-call view you get the current response codes and a description that is usually truncated, plus a history with no good way to print or export it. The advanced user platform gives you more, but as an information dump in a table, so lining up which revision a response belonged to against when it came in is difficult. It also does not help a foreman, because a foreman is visual. He lives on prints and on the ground in front of him. That gap is why we show status on the map, in color, on the polygon he is standing in.

We hit an unmarked 4-inch gas main and this is exactly how it went. The crew photographed everything the moment they understood what they had, and those photos filed themselves to the nearest ticket with time and location stamps. Then we called the gas emergency line, reported a struck line, and asked for someone on site. We pulled our ticket reports so we could show that everything had been cleared and what was marked was marked. The utility investigation found the line on the prints and confirmed it had been missed during locating. Our before, during, and after images showed where the last mark sat against where the drill rod actually went. The report went together in the same platform with the draw tools and the PDF builder.

Most of the time they just want the ticket number and they look it up themselves. When we hand over a ticket report instead, it goes better. Portal history is hard to read and harder to place on the ground. Ours lays the ticket out in chronological order, color coded, showing what was submitted and what each response was at the time it happened.

Better to be safe than sorry, and everyone in the field has the authority to stop work. If something is uncertain we would rather spend an extra couple of hours spotting a utility, self-locating, or calling in for assistance than risk equipment, people, or a life. We are always potholing, always daylighting, and we core drill. We do not want to be anywhere near the tolerance zone.

No. You keep submitting through your state's one-call center exactly as you do now. Quick811 is what happens after: tickets land on a map, response and revision history stay readable, photos file to the right ticket, and office and field look at the same thing at the same time. We built it on the 811 layer on purpose. In a general project management tool, tickets are bolted on top of something else. We started at the bottom, with can we dig here, and added permitting, documents, and photo history above it.