My second day at SEPI kicked off with meeting Wally Little, the Subservice Utility Engineering Manager. He explained to me that the responsibilities of his department consist of locating, mapping out, and planning the installation and management of any underground system or utility. This includes sewers, gas lines, water lines and pipes, electrical lines, phone lines, TV lines, and more. Do you ever see those spray-painted colored markings, lines, and words on streets, grass, and sidewalks and wonder what they’re for? Well I did too until today. The markings are used to show the location of the underground utilities listed above. Often times, the pipes and/or lines are at different levels of depth, but they are always (or at least they should be) directly underneath their designated marking. Blue spray paint represents a water line or system, green represents a waste/sewer system, red represents electric power lines, orange represents communication lines (cable, phone, TV lines, etc.), and yellow represents gas lines. We traveled to a project that Mr. Little was working on where he and his team were hired to locate and mark the underground utilities in a neighborhood. I received a detailed explanation about how they are able to exactly locate an underground system without being able to see it, or without the aid of previously drawn maps of the different utilities in an area. I’ll give you guys the short version. So basically, they hook up a complicated device similar to a metal detector that makes a loud noise whenever it is swung over any electrical or metal object. Based on the type of sound the device makes and some other information that appears on a screen on the device, you can tell what type of utility you’ve located. Once you’ve decided which type of line, pipe, or system you’ve located, you then use the appropriate spray paint color to paint a dot, line, or short description (usually abbreviations or initials – i.e. TV, Tele., etc.) of the system after every 15 or so steps of following the utility’s trail. I was allowed to spray-paint an entire quarter-mile long electric line! The reason for marking these utilities’ locations is usually to ensure the safety of those near them, and to show where and where not to dig into the ground so that you will not damage or strike one of these systems. For example, you wouldn’t want to stick a metal fence post into the ground and hit a 300,000-volt electric line, because you would instantaneously explode and die. We would like to avoid that if possible. It felt like I was potentially saving lives when they let me mark the electric lines, so that was quite a nice feeling to end my day with.
