Call Before You Dig

You can protect yourself and your family from injury, expense and penalties by knowing where underground utility lines are buried before you begin a digging project. Even simple digging projects can damage utility lines and can disrupt vital services to an entire neighborhood, harm diggers, and potentially result in expensive fines and repair costs.

Whether you are a homeowner or a professional excavator, one easy phone call to 811 gets public underground utility lines marked for free. Private utility lines are the responsibility of the property owner.

When you call 811, operators at the Oregon Utility Notification Center will ask you for the location of your digging job and route your call to affected utility companies. Your utility companies will then send a professional locator to your site to mark their lines within a few days. Once public underground lines have been marked, you will know the approximate location of utility lines and can dig safely in the public right-of-way.   Remember that the depth of utility lines varies, and there may be multiple utility lines in the same area.