Industry Events
6 sources
Texas811 Damage Prevention Summit — Galveston, October 7–9, 2026
The Texas damage prevention calendar's main event, six weeks out. Early registration pricing ends September 2.
Ground Truth
Ground Truth: industry news & education.
Sourced industry stories, field guides and technical explainers for the people who plan, locate, build and excavate. Browse the archive by topic; each article shows its sources and review date.
Industry Watch
Current industry information
Sourced summaries of news, regulation, equipment, events, recalls, safety alerts and litigation.
Industry News
2 sources
CGA’s damage index hit a record high in 2025, on 221,717 reported damages
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.
Law & Regulation
5 sources
If your spec still says ASCE 38-02, it is citing a superseded standard
Two standards changes that quietly invalidate boilerplate: the SUE standard was replaced and retitled in 2022, and residential post-tensioned slabs picked up a code reference in the 2024 IRC.
Law & Regulation
3 sources
New Mexico’s excavation rules changed on April 6, 2026 — new ticket types are now in force
If your New Mexico ticketing habits were formed before April 2026, they are out of date. The Public Regulation Commission's damage prevention rules changed, and New Mexico 811 now issues ticket types that did not previously exist.
Safety Alerts
3 sources
PHMSA advisory bulletin puts excavation damage prevention back on the record
PHMSA used National Safe Digging Month to restate what it expects: adherence to CGA best practices, accurate and timely locating, and proactive coordination with excavators.
Equipment
3 sources
Survey-grade GNSS is arriving inside the locator itself
The interesting equipment trend is not better detection. It is that the point being marked now carries a survey-grade coordinate at the moment it is found.
Industry News
3 sources
Texas has logged more than 4,800 excavation-related pipeline strikes so far in 2026
Railroad Commission data reported in June puts Texas past 4,800 excavation-related pipeline strikes for the year — and roughly a third of the excavators involved had not contacted 811 before digging.
Law & Regulation
6 sources
Texas’s underground facility safety bills died in 2025 — the work moved to an interim subcommittee
Three bills touching Texas's dig law died in committee in 2025 without a hearing between them advancing. The story didn't end there: the House stood up an interim Subcommittee on Underground Facility Safety, and it has already taken testimony.
Litigation
1 sources
Utility pays maximum penalty and must remap its lines after telling an excavator the site was marked
A Missouri consent judgment reported in May 2026 is worth reading by anyone whose job involves telling somebody else that a site has been marked.
No current verified article is published in this category.
Open the full Industry WatchField Guides
Practical reference material
Plain-language guides for common field, planning and excavation questions.
Field Guides
5 sources
Booking a concrete scan: what to have ready, and what the markup means
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
Boring vs. trenching: what changes about the locate
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
Caliche, clay and the river valley: what our ground does to radar
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.
Field Guides
9 sources
How to tell whether your slab is post-tension before anyone cuts it
A post-tensioned slab holds a large amount of stored energy in a small number of steel strands. Knowing whether you are standing on one changes how the next cut gets planned — and it is a question worth answering before the saw comes off the truck.
Field Guides
5 sources
Quality Levels A through D, for engineers writing a scope
Utility quality levels are a statement about evidence, not a ranking of effort. Each level says what was actually done to produce the information on the drawing — and the single most consequential boundary is the one between designating a utility and verifying it.
Field Guides
5 sources
Reading a locate report: what “investigated, nothing found” actually means
Two locate reports can show the same marks and mean very different things. The difference lives in the parts people skip: the quality level, the coverage statement, and the method behind each mark.
Field Guides
5 sources
Septic, irrigation, and the lines nobody drew
Every developed lot accumulates buried lines the way a garage accumulates boxes — steadily, quietly, and with no inventory. The ones that get hit are rarely the ones on a drawing.
Field Guides
10 sources
What 811 covers, what it doesn’t, and why the meter is the dividing line
A free 811 ticket is the first thing you should do before you dig, and it is not the last. In both Texas and New Mexico the law that makes one-call work also draws a line around what it covers — and on most job sites that line sits at the meter.
Field Guides
6 sources
What ground-penetrating radar can and can’t see, in plain terms
Radar does not photograph the ground. It sends a pulse, listens for reflections, and produces a record that has to be interpreted. Understanding what creates a reflection — and what kills one — tells you when GPR is the right call and when it is the wrong one.
Field Guides
8 sources
What the APWA color code means when you see paint on the ground
The paint and flags on a job site are a standardized language. Eight colors, each with a defined meaning, plus a set of conventions for what the marks are actually telling you about position, depth and age.
Field Guides
7 sources
What to have ready before a locate, so the visit goes faster
Most of what slows a locate down is decided before anyone arrives. Five minutes of preparation on your end usually buys back an hour on site, and it materially changes how much of the site we can actually cover.
Field Guides
5 sources
Who pays when a private line gets hit? A plain description of how the responsibility falls
When a public utility gets hit, a whole statutory machine engages. When a private line gets hit, there is no machine — just the property owner, the excavator, and whatever they knew and did beforehand. That difference is worth understanding before you dig, not after.
Field Guides
5 sources
Why a buried line fails, and what a fault locate can and can’t narrow down
Tracing a line answers “where does it run?” Fault locating answers “where along it did it go wrong?” Those are different questions, they use different techniques, and confusing them is the fastest way to dig a hole in the wrong place.
Training
Technical learning
Method, equipment and field-practice material organized for deeper study.
Training
6 sources
Depth readings and their error budget: what the number actually means
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.
Training
5 sources
Distortion and coupling: why the line is not always where the locator says
A locator never lies about what it measures. It measures the field — and the field is not always centered on the line. The two mechanisms that move it are distortion and coupling, and recognizing them is what separates a mark from a guess.
Training
8 sources
Electromagnetic locating basics: how a locator actually finds a line
A locator does not detect metal. It detects a magnetic field produced by current travelling along a conductor. Almost everything that goes wrong in the field follows from that one sentence.
Training
5 sources
Non-conductive lines: sondes, duct rods, and knowing when to stop trying
A plastic pipe with no tracer wire gives an EM locator nothing to work with. The honest answers are a sonde pushed through the line, radar from the surface, or admitting the line can't be traced today — and knowing which applies is the skill.
Training
6 sources
Reading a congested corridor: a sequence that keeps the evidence straight
A congested corridor is where every lesson in this track lands at once: coupling, distortion, non-conductive lines, unreliable depths. No single method survives it. A sequence does.
Training
5 sources
Tracer wire: how it’s supposed to be built, why it fails, and testing what you inherited
A tracer wire is the cheapest component on the job and the one that decides whether a plastic line can ever be traced again. Most tracer wire problems were installed, not developed — and a locator inherits all of them.
