Dig Work in Nanaimo

How does the locate actually work?

Every dig starts with a locate request, and its timings shape your schedule more than most people expect. The request goes in free, and members respond within three working days — five where the project is large. Those are working days, so a request filed on a Thursday can easily mean the following Wednesday before everything is back. That is the most common reason a start date moves, and it is entirely avoidable by filing early.

Once the responses are in, two clocks start. The ticket stays valid for 30 days from the day it was requested, and digging has to begin within 14 days of the locate. Miss either and the whole thing has to be requested again, which puts you back at the start of the response window. That matters when a build slips, and builds do — if your foundation date moves by three weeks, the locate that was ready for the original date is not ready for the new one. So we time the request against your real start date rather than filing it the moment a quote is signed.

What comes back is not a guarantee of everything underground. It covers the members' own infrastructure — the utilities belonging to companies signed up to the system. Anything private stays invisible to it: the line running out to a shop or a barn, an old septic field, a well feed, an irrigation loop a previous owner put in and never drew. Those are the ones that surprise people, and they are the ones we ask you about directly, because you or your neighbours are usually the only record of them.

On site we treat the marks as a zone rather than a line. We hand-expose where we are working close to something marked and keep the machine off it until we can see it, since marks are accurate to a tolerance rather than to the centimetre and paint on grass moves with the weather. If we hit something the locate did not show, we stop — not slow down, stop — look at what it is, and talk it through with you before anything else happens. That conversation costs a great deal less than the alternative every single time, which is why we build the locate window into the schedule instead of treating it as paperwork to be got past.

How the four fit together

On a new build the order is fixed. We clear and strip the lot, dig and backfill the foundation, put the drainage in against the wall before the backfill goes on, and build the driveway last so it isn't chewed up by the trucks that came before it. On an existing property the work is usually standalone — a drive that's failed, a perimeter drain that's stopped running, a shop pad that needs cutting into a slope. Either way we file the BC 1 Call locate before a machine moves, and anything past 1.2 metres that someone has to enter gets sloped, benched or shored to WorkSafeBC's rules.