Question: We have been working onsite for the last 3 months. We know for a fact that nothing new has gone in here, as they would have had to dig through our site to put it in! We have the Dial Before You Dig plans from when we started the job but are only now starting to do the excavating, which is why we now need a cable locator to come out. Can’t you just use those plans?

Answer:

We appreciate that you have the original plans and yes, there is probably a 99% chance that there will be nothing new on any updated plans from Dial Before You Dig.

But we still need to follow the rules put in place by the utility companies – as well as our own procedures – which both state that there must be current Dial Before You Dig plans onsite while locating and excavating.

Also, don’t forget that boring machines these days can bore horizontally quite a distance. There is now more optic fibre going in the ground than ever before. How do you know for certain that someone hasn’t bored a new optic fibre from one street, through the front of your worksite, to a different street on the other side of your site?

Besides I don’t know what the big deal is about getting updated plans. On the DBYD system you can just click update plans and you don’t need to do anything else. Or even if you put a whole new request in you will find they will probably all come back before you guys even finish smoko.

Don’t believe me, here is a video I did because of this very reason of constantly getting this or similar questions to this about not having time to wait for Dial Before You dig plans.