Hydro-excavation · daylighting · utility potholing · Gable Creek & Sawmill Pike · field manual no. 12
The line is found before it is hit.
Clearline Hydro-Excavation exposes buried utilities with water and vacuum instead of teeth — every conduit, main and unknown steel daylighted at hand pressure before a machine is allowed inside its exclusion zone. This page is the short form of the manual our crews cut by; the numbers are on page one because that is where we would want them.
Daylighting $11.40 / lin ft · pole holes from $210 · zero utility strikes since 2012 · (555) 062-9917 · desk@clearlinehydro.example
The method
Water finds it. Vacuum takes it. Teeth never meet it.
A hydro-excavation truck pushes heated water through a handheld wand at a pressure that cuts soil and nothing else, while the boom’s vacuum lifts the slurry to a 12-yard debris tank. The operator watches each conduit arrive in the wall of the hole — sees the utility appear — and the hole is the size of a mailbox, not a trench. Around gas mains, fibre bundles and the duct bank nobody drew in 1974, there is no second method we would sign our names to.
Services & rates
Three services, ledgered
Each line is the service, the rate and the scope it buys — the same ledger the estimator reads from and the invoice is written against.
D-01
Daylighting & potholing — $11.40 / lin ft
Continuous daylight runs along a marked corridor, or individual potholes at joints and bends: each utility exposed, depth and alignment recorded to the survey, backfilled in compacted lifts. The record is the product as much as the hole.
D-02
Pole holes & bell holes — from $210
Single clean excavations to whatever the staking sheet calls for — pole bases, anchor points, transformer pads — dug inside live corridors without a locator’s worst morning. Set, inspected, backfilled the same shift.
D-03
Slot trenching — $13.80 / lin ft
Narrow non-destructive trenches for fibre, conduit and service lines where an open cut would be vandalism: six to twelve inches wide, opened to depth, bedding placed, backfill compacted to 95 percent standard Proctor, and the surface left matching what we found.
The winter clause
Heated water, frozen ground, January
Frozen ground is why the truck runs a boiler: 180-degree water at the wand cuts through frost that would send a compact machine home, and rock-heavy till that would blunt a tooth comes apart under jet and vacuum with no strike risk in sight. The 811 locate is filed before the wand is hung, the corridor is walked with your locator, and every find — depth, size, material, condition — goes onto the daylight record your crews and ours both keep. Digging season is a story the utility world never believed; the desk answers the phone in January the same as June.
The response
Four hours from call to clean corridor
The mobilization a strike costs is measured in neighbourhoods, so ours is measured in minutes. Four moves, the same on a scheduled corridor as on a 2 a.m. emergency dig.
Ticket & marks
The 811 ticket confirmed, the corridor walked with your locator, and every private line flagged by hand before the wand is hung.
Corridor set
Exclusion zones taped, spoils positioned, vacuum boom ranged — the hole is planned before the water is.
Cut & see
Heated water at hand pressure, slurry to the tank, and each utility watched into the wall of the hole, then recorded.
Record & close
Depths and alignments surveyed onto the daylight record, backfill compacted in lifts, surface matched, record filed.
2025 — 2026
The daylight wall
The desk keeps count
Our cutover needed three duct banks exposed beside an energized station, and the last contractor on that corridor made the news for the wrong reason. Clearline daylighted all three banks in a day and a half, handed my engineers a record with depths to the inch, and backfilled so neatly the inspection was brief. They are on our standards list now, in writing.
The wand-only clause
Inside a marked exclusion zone, no tooth touches the ground — water and vacuum only, on every job, at every hour. The rate does not change for the caution, and the clause has kept the strike counter at zero since 2012. Slow is a method, not a surcharge.
The four regulars
Questions from the corridor
The four every locate call and every contractor call starts with. If yours is not here, the desk answers same-day, and the person on it has held the wand in your corridor.
Is hydro-excavation more expensive than a machine?
Per hour, yes; per incident, never. A bucket in a marked corridor is the cheapest digging there is right up until it is the most expensive thing your utility has ever bought. Our rates are printed because the arithmetic is honest: daylighting costs more than a trench and less than an outage, a repair crew, or a street with no gas on a February night.
What about the lines that are not on the ticket?
That is the whole reason the method exists. The wand cuts soil and yields to everything else — an unmarked duct, a forgotten steel, the gas service from 1961 — all of it arrives in the wall of the hole intact and gets recorded before anyone is near it. The locate finds what the maps know; the wand survives what they do not.
Can you dig in the middle of the night?
The truck carries its own light plant, the boiler keeps the water hot to twenty below, and the desk phone is a person around the clock. Emergency daylighting for strike response and fault location is about a third of our calendar. The rate at 3 a.m. is the rate at noon — panic is not a service we sell.
What happens to the slurry?
It rides to licensed disposal in the debris tank, manifested, and the clean-fill fraction is screened and recycled where the receiving site allows. Nothing is spread on your right-of-way, nothing enters a catch basin, and the manifest number rides on the invoice for the auditor in all of us.
Emergency digs roll 24/7 · scheduled corridors book two weeks out · (555) 062-9917 · desk@clearlinehydro.example
Send the corridor, get the record
Location, the utility or structure to expose, and the footage if you have it. The desk quotes from the ledger above, the ticket is filed inside a day of a signed sheet, and the daylight record is part of the price. desk@clearlinehydro.example