Safe Practices for Utility Excavation

There are many steps that can be taken to safeguard against common, and often dangerous, mistakes involving utility excavation. In addition to standard precautions and measures, Mid-Atlantic Utility Locating (Mid-Atlantic) provides unparalleled utility locating and excavation services that can confirm and expand upon mandatory services that are regulated by state law.

To assist with your next excavation project, we have assembled that following steps to guide you in completing your job in a safe, efficient manner:

1. Call your local one-call ticket center (Miss Utility in Virginia, Maryland, and DC) 72 hours in advance of any planned excavation.
2. Proceed only after you have received an ‘All Clear’ notification from your one-call ticket center.
3. Respect and protect markings, flags, and offset marks placed by the utility locators.
4. Call Mid-Atlantic – Unlike standard site utility searches, Mid-Atlantic subsurface utility engineers have the experience and expertise to effectively search your project site for any utilities, recorded or unrecorded, public or private.  In the long run, using Mid-Atlantic can save time, money, and even lives.
5. Hand dig to expose any buried utility that may interfere with work to be performed on your site.  In addition, Mid-Atlantic can provide soft dig and/or vacuum excavation services for larger projects, which will carefully and safely remove rock and sediment from utility lines and pipes.
6. Use caution when backfilling on your site.  It is an often overlooked fact that careful backfilling is just as important careful excavation.  Materials other than soil, such as rocks or miscellaneous construction hardware, can damage utility lines and piping if not removed before backfilling.  Careless backfilling can lead to dangerous environments that are often not realized until years after project completion, especially when dealing with gas or petroleum lines.

Mid-Atlantic hopes that these quality-controlled steps will help guide you with your future excavation projects, and we stand ready to assist you with any subsurface utility engineering needs.