Texas law states that "...a person who intends to excavate shall notify a notification center not earlier than the 14th day before the date the excavation is to begin or later than the 48th hour before the time the excavation is to begin..." (see Utilities Code Title 5, Chapter 251 and Administrative Code Title 16, Part 1, Chapter 18). The purpose of the system is to help prevent damage to public and private utilities like water mains, gas lines, telecommunications bundles, etc. (Class A underground facility operator). As necessary, the Class A operator is to mark the location of its underground facilities at or near the site of the proposed excavation.
Should you ever find yourself in need of investigating some digging/excavation operation, here's what seems to be an unadvertised link:
http://www.managetickets.com/morecApp/t ... .jsp?db=tx
The initial search screen offers a huge number of options, and can look pretty daunting...makes you think at first you need information about the applicant for the work as well as the type of excavation. But all you really need to know is an approximate date range for the work, and be able to identify the general area on a map:
- To the right of the "Ticket Information" field, set a fairly broad date range that you're confident will include the work; 811 checks are supposed to be performed no earlier than 14 days before the digging starts, but if you don't find what you want, try expanding the date range.
- Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the Google map of Texas.
- Zoom in closely enough so that you accurately demarc the area that contains the excavation work. Unless you're in a rural area, you probably want to be zoomed in tightly so that your search results don't include routine street or utilities maintenance.
- Click on the button labeled "Create Polygon." Right-click on the map to add a starting point, and then click around the area to draw a polygon--one point for each click--and finally join the ends of the polygon to close it. The area will be highlighted in yellow.
- The last step is to scroll to the very bottom of the screen, and click "Search." I takes a few seconds to build and display the list, but you'll see a summary of all the known excavation activities with the timeframe and map location you specified. To drill-down into individual entries to get full details, click on the "Ticket #" and, voila!
I'm in the block where that street was previously a dead-end (which also meant no through traffic behind me), but new construction just started taking place where the street terminates. I came home for lunch to find two backhoes dredging out a very large swatch of land parallel to the crude-oil pipeline path--with PVC pipe laying next to the path, obviously for for water/sewage tie-in--and no markers (flags, stakes, paint strips, etc.) to be found to delineate the existing pipeline. Being lunchtime, I saw no one around that looked like a foreman or manager that I might ask, but even if crude oil and not natural gas, I wasn't too excited about the prospect of someone accidentally cracking open that buried pipeline 100 feet from my back fence.
Neither the Call811.com website (http://call811.com/map-page/texas) nor Texas 811 contain a link to the "master" database and, while Lone Star 811 does, it sends you only to a log-in page for members, not one that contains a link to the public database search.
So I called 811 myself and explained what I was trying to find, and the agent pointed me to the search tool linked above. Perfect. Maybe the Texas 811 systems don't feel a link to the public search would be used frequently enough to mention, or perhaps they don't want umpteen hits degrading online performance. Dunno. But it was certainly useful to me, and I found what I wanted to know in about two minutes.
