It was supposed to be a routine job – a simple water line installation for a private home. And for Tony D’Angelo, a supervisor with Gen-Con Excavating in Philadelphia, that was a good thing. On any given day, 15 backhoes dedicated to Gen-Con’s plumbing business are out in Philadelphia and its suburbs installing sewer and water lines for private homes. These machines are part of just one sector of the company’s business, which includes an equipment rental division and a general excavation branch. But little did D’Angelo know this routine job would almost prove fatal for one of his utility crews.
Philadelphia is one of the oldest urban areas in the United States. The ground around William Penn’s utopian city is stacked with hundreds of years of water, gas and sewer lines – not to mention modern electric and telecommunication cables. “We’ve run into wooden water lines,” D’Angelo recalls. “Stuff that’s so old and fragile, all you have to do is disturb the soil and it lets loose. So we’re tuned into watching for and avoiding underground hazards.”
For D’Angelo, utility strikes are simply a constant hazard – the price his company pays for working in an old city like Philly. The first time D’Angelo witnessed a utility strike was 1986 and he was a 16-year-old backhoe operator, a seasoned vet with four years experience behind the sticks. He hit an old lead water pipe while putting in a residential water line.
The strike rattled the young D’Angelo. But in the grand scheme of things, it was just an ordinary – even mundane – utility strike for Gen-Con. And nothing like the strike that befell a Gen-Con crew just a few years later.
No one expected anything out of the ordinary on this installation. “But one thing about Philly,” D’Angelo says, “In some places, the Pennsylvania Power Company has buried 13,300-volt electrical cables 15 inches under the ground. They’re dangerous. We watch for them like hawks.”
On this day, the local One Call utility mapping service showed such a cable on the jobsite. “But it was marked 10 feet away from where we were digging,” D’Angelo says. “So my operator thinks this is a no-brainer. We’re just gonna get in here and go to work and get done. He starts the trench and took two buckets out – and on the third bucket he cut right through the power cable.”
The severed electric cable arced up immediately, flashing and sending sparks shooting out of the trench and shutting its transformer down instantly. But in Philadelphia, D’Angelo explains, many transformers rearm after 10 seconds to keep their respective grids online. Gen-Con’s crew had 10 seconds to react before another 13,300-volt power surge came back through the severed cable.
The foreman on the job that day reacted immediately. “Get that bucket outta the hole!” he yelled at the operator. “Everybody else get away from the trench!”
But the operator had panicked at the flash and explosion from the strike. He was already out of his seat and heading over the side of the ‘hoe. “Do not get down off of that machine!” the foreman yelled. “Don’t do anything but get that bucket out of the hole!” The crew scattered. The operator got hold of himself. He scrambled back behind the sticks to try and lift the bucket out of the hole. But it was too late. The transformer rearmed and flashed again. A second surge of high-voltage electricity shot through the cable, hit the metal bucket and arced so violently, it blew the backhoe bucket clean off the machine.
It was a bad strike – but it could have been much worse. The blast was strong enough to kill anyone near the bucket when the current came back on line. The flash from the explosion was bright enough that it might have blinded bystanders, and the boom generated by the explosion was loud enough to destroy eardrums and permanently deafen anyone nearby. “We were lucky the grid shut down,” D’Angelo says. “If that transformer had armed itself a third time – which was a possibility – it would have doubled its voltage – up to 26,600 volts – to get the grid back up and running. I don’t want to think about what would have happened then. When the guy from Pennsylvania Power showed up, he took one look at the strike and said, ‘You guys are the luckiest sons of bitches in the world right now.’”
That near-catastrophe haunts D’Angelo. “They found it wasn’t our fault. And nothing came of it – because nobody got hurt,” he says. “But the thing I worry about is: What if somebody had been standing next to that trench when that thing went off? The blast was strong enough to blow a bucket off a backhoe… It would have killed them. And all because of a mismarked utility burial.”
Could things be better? Could the risk of death, injury, property damage and financial loss due to utility strikes be mitigated somehow? Hell, yes, D’Angelo says. “The way I see it, all water mains, gas mains – any utility should be packed in sand or screening material,” he says. “It should have locator tape on it. It should be accurately mapped. And any old lines in the ground should be removed when new ones are put in. And these things should be automatic – they should be mandated by law.”
But it’ll never happen, he says. Contractors and utility company employees are always under the gun. Haste leads to errors. Cost is another issue, D’Angelo says. Replacing a sewer line and water main might cost a homeowner $5,000. “But you do it right – you open that street up, shore it, take out all the old lines, tie in the neighbor’s utilities, pack the new lines in sand, put marking tape on them – that’s going to take a lot more time,” D’Angelo says. “And now, the price of that $5,000 job has tripled – it’s going to cost that homeowner $15,000. They’re not going to go for that.”
But it’s not in D’Angelo’s nature to do nothing about what he sees as a serious and potentially deadly problem. Gen-Con hasn’t had a utility strike in four years. And that, D’Angelo says, is because the company adopted new hiring, training and promotion practices aimed directly at eliminating strikes.
“When we hire, we make these guys start out as laborers,” he explains. “You don’t come into our company as an operator. If you know what you’re doing when you’re a laborer down in a hole – and this holds true for residential, commercial, industrial construction – then later, as an operator, you know what that guy down there is looking for as your point man. You know what he’s trying to find and what he’s trying to do. On top of that, you know how to set the hole up. You know how to shelf it. You know how to do everything. Because you were down in there yourself, hands-on, before you ever got on a machine.”
Often, D’Angelo says, laborers in the hole don’t know what they’re looking for when it comes to avoiding a utility strike. Gen-Con teaches them to observe the color and smell of dirt they’re working in and how the dirt feels when they’re digging.
“If you’ve got an old gas service that let loose at one time, that gas is going to aerate into the soil,” he says. “So if you open up the ground and you smell gas – okay, there’s a gas line down here somewhere.”
Same with the color of the dirt. “If it’s a different color from the soil around it, that’s a clue that somebody’s been here before,” he explains. “You’re not dealing with virgin soil. You need to slack up and check things out. We go by all these little clues – and so far it’s worked well for us.”
Still, D’Angelo feels it’s not enough. “I’ve trained my people. I’ve taught them to slow down and be safe… to take their time and be methodical. I’ve done all I can do. It’s time now for the state, local or federal government to step in and start mandating utility installation, removal, marking and pricing. Once we do that, the problem won’t magically go away. But at least we’ll have the bull by the horns and we can start making some progress on this matter. ‘Cause, man, people get killed every day dealing with this stuff.”