What we cut
Three trades, one checklist
Everything Vantage does begins the same way — a radar sweep, a locate ticket, a drawn cross-section — because everything underground is easier to avoid than to repair.
Ground-penetrating radar
A GPR sweep maps conduit, water, gas and unknown steel under the cut line before the bucket is hung. Zero utility strikes since it became policy in 2016 — across 8,400 feet of rock trench.
Lift stations & wet utilities
Structures set to invert grade, pipe bedded on stone, backfill placed in compacted lifts around every structure. Set, piped, wired with your electrician, commissioned with your engineer.
GPS grade control
Dozer and excavator cut to the model at ±0.04 ft, verified by rover before handover. The grade you approved on paper is the grade the laser finds on the ground.
Basalt country
The rock trench, start to finish
Kestrel Butte sits on basalt, and basalt does not care about your schedule. We hammer at a quoted hourly rate, vase the trench walls smooth so bedding stone sits flat, and keep a rock log through every metre — so the closure report says rock, not “delays”. Trenches run bedded, benched and shore-tabled the whole way down.
Since 2009
The record, not the pitch
Every figure here comes off a finished job with a closure report behind it. In a trade where the surprises are buried, the numbers are the only advertising that means anything.
The sequence
A trench, engineered
Day −3
Sweep & locate
GPR over the whole cut line, the 811 ticket filed, private lines walked with the owner, and every finding drawn onto one cross-section.
Day 0
Shore & open
Plates or boxes to the OSHA tables, topsoil stripped aside, and the cut opened to the depth the drawing names — one lift at a time.
Days 1–2
Rock, bed & pipe
Hammer work at the quoted rate where the basalt starts, walls vased, bedding stone screeded, and pipe or structure set to invert.
Days 3–4
Backfill in lifts
Eight-inch lifts, each one compacted and tested — 95% standard Proctor under paving, 98% under floor slabs, logged lift by lift.
Close
The closure report
Density logs, rock log, locate numbers and the as-built cross-section, bound and handed over with the surface restored above it.
2025 — 2026
Filed and photographed
Six jobs from the closure-report binder. The dirt is temporary; the paperwork is permanent.
Reviewed
The engineer’s copy
I specified a lift station with a compaction requirement around the structure that most contractors treat as decorative. Vantage handed me a closure report with a density log per lift, a rock log per metre, and an as-built that matched my drawing to the hundredth. They are the only earthwork contractor in my specifications by name.
What does a GPR sweep actually find?
Conduit, water and gas lines, storm and sanitary, unidentified steel, voids and — in the Butte’s case — the top of the basalt, which is the difference between a trench quote and a work of fiction. It sees to roughly eight feet in our soils; deeper targets get a test hole with a vacuum truck.
Can you work beside a live gas main?
Yes, and the sweep is why. The main gets hand-dug exposure first, the exclusion zone goes up, and the machine never enters it. It is slower and it is in the quote — the only cheap alternative is the one that makes the evening news.
Do you just set the lift station, or commission it?
Both, with your people. We set to invert, pipe, backfill and compact; your electrician ties power; then we float-test, run the alarm circuit and hand you the commissioning sheet with the closure report. A station that has never run is a very expensive planter.
Why 98% Proctor under a slab?
Because a floor slab is a bridge over whatever is under it. Standard spec is 95%; we take structural fill under interior slabs to 98% — one extra pass per lift — and the difference shows up a decade later as a floor that never knows it is floating.
Specifiers’ questions
Asked, answered
The four that engineers and site superintendents ask first. The rest usually dissolve the moment the closure report from a previous job lands in their inbox.
Trench permits filed Mondays and Thursdays · (555) 023-8851 · desk@vantageearth.example
Send the drawings, get the cross-section
Site plan, invert depths and the soils report if one exists. We sweep, we draw, we quote against the cross-section — and the closure report is part of the price, not an extra. desk@vantageearth.example