Invisible challenges abound in the Tampa Bay area for companies such as Verizon that try to plant new lines.
By BILL VARIAN
Published December 25, 2004
TAMPA - Skinny pipes pump water to your spigots. Thicker ones take dirty water away. Separate lines funnel rainwater off the streets, and others bring reclaimed water for your lawn.
Throw in the underground cable and phone lines, electrical wires, gas pipes and even an ammonia line in one area, and, well, it's getting crowded down there.
Despite years of efforts to map the stuff, government officials across the Tampa Bay area acknowledge they don't know where a lot of it is. At least not precisely.
"The confidence level can range from, "Yeah, we think it's on this side of the road' to "We can pinpoint it within half a foot,' " said Harry Niles, senior professional engineer for the Hillsborough County Water Department.
That presents challenges, as residents push to bury more wires underground to improve the look of the neighborhood or reduce power failures when Florida transforms from the Sunshine State to the Tropical Storm State.
The invisible tangle beneath roads and rights of way surfaced in recent months after Verizon Communications embarked on an extensive fiber optic line installation in Hillsborough and Pasco counties.
The project essentially adds one more lane of underground traffic beneath county streets. But in the process, crews working for Verizon have cracked about 200 water and sewer lines.
County officials issued a temporary stop-work order last month after crews punctured a sewer line in Northdale, causing a hole to form in the road that sucked in a car. A contractor working for the county to repair the break then cracked a water line, thwarting efforts to fix the original problem.
"It's just difficult to work within the right of way and work below ground and do it flawlessly," said Verizon spokesman Bob Elek. "There have been times when the (underground maps) have been inaccurate. There have been times when contractors working for our company have done something inappropriate."
Verizon has since gone back to work, under closer scrutiny by the county. But the incidents have provided a cautionary tale.
More and more, residents are pressing governments to force their utilities underground. The Council of Neighborhood Associations, an umbrella group for more than 100 neighborhood organizations in Pinellas County, seeks to have all utilities moved underground.
It can be a costly alternative to overhead lines, and one that, as the Verizon experience shows, is not without perils.
Governments across the country have spent billions of dollars trying to plot just where their underground pipes and wires are buried.
In unincorporated Hillsborough, the effort dates back two decades, said Niles, who oversees the mapping when it comes to pipes that carry water. The county has about 3,000 miles of roadway just in the unincorporated areas, most of it with utility lines running below.
Computers have made the task easier. As new subdivisions are built, utility workers can feed information about where the pipes are planted into the system, creating a massive database for future reference.
Workers also plug in information from older developments, sometimes using maps decades old that depict how a subdivision or strip mall was constructed. But the new digitized information is only as good as the information available to them. In many cases, that comes from paper maps.
The original development maps often are skewed by a few feet or more. They may show what the builder intended, but not how the pipe actually was put into the ground after the path had to be altered to, say, get around an oak tree.
"We have in some cases very good information," said Steve Daignault, administrator for public works and utilities services for the city of Tampa. "Then we have some older pipes that we don't have good information on. So any time we do utility work, we make a note of what we find when we open the ground up." In a few cases, there are no maps at all. Then workers edge in the direction of folklore, looking for some engineer, contractor or neighbor who might remember what happened.
"That's when you call old George, who's been around 30 years," said Warren Wagner, the utilities operations maintenance manager in Pasco County.
Hillsborough's situation is complicated by the fact that control of underground utilities has changed hands over the decades. Some of the county's oldest neighborhoods have water and sewer systems initially built and owned by private companies.
The county has taken over many of those systems and discovered that some of them are a little light on records when it comes to the location of their pipes.
"Some of it is not too bad," Niles said. "Some of it is pitiful."
St. Petersburg, having owned its own utility continually, doesn't have quite the same problem. City officials say private utilities - cable and electric - have had a pretty good track record.
Pinellas County, though, has struggled to log its underground pipes and wires. Just as in Hillsborough, there are many older neighborhoods where records can be spotty.
"I know that problem well," said Pick Talley, director of utilities for the county.
Talley said workers in his office met last week to discuss ongoing news coverage of ruptured water and sewer lines caused by Verizon's contract workers in Hillsborough. They said they plan to contact the phone company to discuss what its plans are for Pinellas.
So far, Verizon is concentrating its work in the Tampa Bay area in Hillsborough and Pasco counties, where it has installed about 7-million feet of fiber optic line. The project is part of the company's effort to replace its traditional copper-wire network with high-bandwidth fiber optic lines that ultimately will enable new phone, Internet and video offerings to compete with cable.
What its crews encounter can vary greatly. Typically, a busy street also is busy underground.
While working a couple of streets near Carrollwood recently, Verizon had to dodge cable, electrical and water lines, slipping a tube perpendicular between the electrical and water lines separated by maybe a foot.
Around the corner, the company's crew confronted some of its own telephone lines as well. The right of way was so congested they had to dig beneath all of the existing lines to get a clear shot.
And that's just on a residential street. Consider a commercial thoroughfare, such as Waters Avenue near Anderson Road.
There, the underground obstacles include two different telephone lines, cable television wire and fiber optic line in the right of way. There is a 20-inch diameter water main - compared with the four- to eight-inch line on residential streets - and a six-inch gas line as well.
Beneath the road is a 24-inch sewer force main. All of these are buried at varied depths. A two-inch wide sewer line and another telephone line cross the road as well.
"Threading the needle through the web of things under the surface is the trick," said Niles, the Hillsborough Water Department engineer. "Sometimes, it's no big deal, especially if your out in the hinterlands. Sometimes you almost can't help but hit something."
