Prove what was marked, where you dug, and when.

An emergency ticket gets a faster response and it is meant for something that poses a danger to life or to what is going on in the area. A struck gas line you cannot locate, damage to infrastructure, the kind of thing that pulls in 911. If you do not know where the hit is, that is what you use to get someone out to mark it. We do not typically use them, because we make sure everything is done right before we start digging.

In Michigan the tolerance zone is 4 feet on each side of the mark. Inside it our SOP is a hand shovel or vacuum excavation, and nothing else. The excavator comes out to backfill. Trenches on our jobs run six to eight feet. It is slower than swinging a bucket, and it is simply how the work gets done properly around a marked facility.

We show them the paperwork. This is the approved permit for the right-of-way, this is where the county said we could dig, this is the easement and this is where it ends. The government or the utility company bought the right to be there. Most of the time the conversation ends once somebody can see the actual document, which is why the permit and the prints live on the job rather than in a truck.

With dated pictures you did not have to go looking for. Investigators make mistakes. Sometimes they photograph a completely different area than the one where the damage happened. We had a gas claim where the damaged area in their photos appeared to intersect a pedestal that did not exist when we bored, so there was no way our bore path crossed what they were pointing at, and their photos turned out to be roughly 200 feet south of where they originally claimed the damage was. We answer claims like that with a side-by-side report built from our own annotated images. A lot of these claims companies are looking for easy money, and they go quiet when you show your work.

Frost laws slow us down through the winter, so we either bid out-of-state work or use the time to pay down the equipment maintenance debt that piles up during peak production. We try to keep our guys local as much as we can. We are constantly bidding and looking for what is next. Mid-summer is the peak, and fall is when everyone is trying to hit the deadlines they missed over the summer, which is where the real rush shows up.

No. You keep using your state's one-call system exactly as you do now. Quick811 is the layer that keeps the tickets, the response history, the permits, and the photos together on the same job, so a foreman can answer a question standing in the field and the office can answer one that shows up a year later.