so what the heck are thes black pieces of corrugated pipe for?

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petersonra

petersonra

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Northern illinois
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Semi-retired engineer
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They are all up and down my street that is being rebuilt in the area where the underground electric is going to be put. It seems like they have dug down to where the gas line is and then put the corrugated pipe in the the holes.very odd to me.
 
The hole is over the gas line lateral that comes off the main gas line. It is the line to the residence/business meter. I think it is just to spot the gas line and they only want to dig it up once, where they will be crossing it, with the new electric primary and or secondaries.
 
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480sparky said:
Why the pipe? The proper equipment can locate the pipe and determine the depth without the need for pipe.
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If they are going to be doing directional boring, the rules for underground locating, at least in my area, require that you physically expose any utility line that the bore will cross.
 
OK did some zooming around, and I think I see what is being installed, in the third photo down, if you zoom to the stack of water pipes just past the building on the right, I think that is what is being put in the ground, the gas main is clearly up by the road, and is also marked with yellow paint strips, and the yellow flags there have writing on them, the flag by the split rail fence doesn't as nether does the one by the drive next door, but the locates and these pipe does go down the street.

Ok Dick tracy mode off.:grin:

If you have explorer 8.0 to zoom in, hold down the CTRL and hit the +, to zoom out CTRL and hit -, to move around use the arrow keys.

You can zoom to a max of 1,000 times this way.
 
ceb58 said:
Ding Ding. We have a winner!
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if i've got to leave a pipe buried for later, what i'll usually do, is sit
a piece of pipe of the same diameter on top of it, on the end, leaving
a coupling on the end of the buried pipe, taped up, so i can get onto
it later just by cutting off the tape...

then the pipe sticking up tells me exactly where the end of the pipe is,
and i can stick a tape down it to hit the pipe, and know exactly how deep it is.
and i can know exactly WHAT it is, 'cause i wrote on the side of the stub
what it is.

comes in handy when there is gonna be a lot of earth moved around after
you put pipe in, and the landmarks disappear, and you are standing there
with a perplexed look on your face, saying it is right *here*.... or here.... or....
 
I don't think they are doing directional boring as they have cut slots in people's driveways (including mine) to trench for the buried conduit they are putting in for the underground electric wires.
 
petersonra said:
I don't think they are doing directional boring as they have cut slots in people's driveways (including mine) to trench for the buried conduit they are putting in for the underground electric wires.
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That would have been my first question because these appear to be locator pits for trenching. I dug quite a few of these to pay for tuition. If the buried line is located, then the hole needs to be only large enough to identify the line. If the line is not found, then the hole needs to be large enough to ensure it is not before or after the pit, and at least as deep as the new line. This is why the sod is cut square and long, but the final hole is small--they found the line in this case. If they hadn't found the line, the entire locator pit would have been squared out to the size of the sod-cut.

The drain tile inserted into the hole is to prevent the hole from collapsing. Obviously they dug these before they were ready to trench. When we had to dig them, we started digging locator pits in the morning and were running the shaker blade through them by lunch.
 
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