Notes from the field
Ground Truth
The field blog for better questions before work starts.
Read practical guides, technical explainers and sourced industry stories. Every Ground Truth article keeps its sources and review date.
Industry Events
6 sources
The Texas damage prevention calendar's main event, six weeks out. Early registration pricing ends September 2.
Field Guides
5 sources
A concrete scan is most useful before the drill is on site and least useful after the first core is wet. Here is what to have ready, how to read the markup, and what the marks do and don't say.
Field Guides
5 sources
A trench discovers its mistakes one shovel-width at a time, in the open. A bore makes its mistakes in the dark, at depth, and tells you about them later. The locate has to be built for the difference.
Field Guides
9 sources
Ask what radar can do here and the honest answer is a question back: mesa or valley? The region's ground splits into two radar environments — and the soil surveys, not the sales brochure, explain which one your site is.
Industry News
2 sources
The Common Ground Alliance's annual damage data is out, and the direction is the wrong one: a record-high index, telecom and gas absorbing 87 percent of reported damages, and the same root causes as every year before.
Training
6 sources
No locating instrument measures depth. Every one of them calculates it from something else — field geometry, travel time, null spacing — and every calculation rests on assumptions the ground is free to violate.