Page 8 - Arkansas 811 Magazine 2021 Issue 3

6 • Arkansas 811 Magazine
2021, Issue 3
Every Not Ev
By Roger Cox President ACTS Now, Inc.
Iheard not so long ago that everything underground was locatable. You could find it with
a spoon if time wasn’t an issue. I suppose that is true. I know in my more than 40 years of working with underground utilities, I located many underground lines with my backhoe or trencher.
There are many buried utility lines today that are more difficult to locate than we’d like to admit. They are difficult to identify simply because you can’t put a tone on the line to trace with your locating receiver.
Underground plastic waterlines, force main sewer lines, polyethylene gas lines are all in that category. Many of the lines were buried without tracer wires. Tracer wires that were placed were often cut and never repaired or deteriorated over time because of poor or no coating on the copper tracer wire. And then some utility lines were placed so deep that traditional electronic locating devices have a hard time of detecting the utility lines.
It is more than an inconvenience to have untoneable lines in your system and most do have these issues to some degree. It is costly, it is risky and potentially dangerous to have buried lines that can not be accurately located within the timeline of a standard locate. As you know, in Arkansas that timeframe is two working days.
CenterPoint Energy, the state’s largest gas distribution company has worked for several years to mitigate untoneable facility. In 2020 they teamed up with RECONN Utility Services to locate, verify facilities and map untoneable plant. This pilot program was initiated throughout the central part of Arkansas and involved the use of various locate equipment including the very first batch of a newly introduced Vivax-Metrotech device.