Underground Utility Locating

Welcome to our blog about underground utility locating and contract locating companies.  If you know much about the industry hopefully we can point out some best practices and ideas to help improve your understanding of how locating works and ways to improve utility safety. If you are a locator yourself our goal is information that you can use to do your job better.

For the rest of you most people don't really know what goes on with the 811 system. Something many people do not know is that 811 is handled on a regional area, usually broken up by state. There are no national laws and each state sets their own regulation on how utility locating companies work. A great source if you are looking for a contract locator is Stake Center Locating. They work nationwide and are extremely helpful if you are looking for resources to improve your existing processes.

Please leave us a comment with an idea for articles you would like to see or information you would like to know about the locating job or how the state call centers work. In addition to the call centers being regional, the company actually performing the locates is typically a contract locating company hired by the utility companies. The 811 call centers gather maps for areas where a utility company has facilities or fiber optics and then sends the customer a notification regarding the excavation details.

For many people the locating process can be quite complicated.  Here, we have hardly even started to consider the actual aspects of finding and locating the buried utilities underground. More will follow, so stay tuned.