Do you know what's under your feet?

As you walk around the streets of your city or town, a whole world is active just a few feet below ground. That subterranean area is filled with a network of sanitary sewer and water lines; natural gas and storm sewer pipes; and telephone, electrical, and cable television lines.

Diagram of typical underground utilities

Depiction of underground utilities on a typical city street. If a contractor strikes a buried pipes, conduits, or cables during construction, it can not only disrupt your schedule and drive up your costs, but also cause injury or even death.

Fortunately, subsurface utility engineering (SUE) can help ensure that the utility infrastructure on your projects is located accurately. SUE is a four-step process that helps you identify the precise horizontal and vertical position, type, size, condition, material, and other characteristics of underground utilities:

Quality Level D involves reviewing utility records and is useful for project planning.
Quality Level C involves surveying visible above ground utility facilities such as manholes and telephone boxes and correlating this information with utility records.
Quality Level B, used during preliminary design, identifies the existence and horizontal position of most subsurface utilities through surface geophysical methods and non-destructive technology such as ground-penetrating radar and electromagnetic tools
Quality Level A provides the highest level of accuracy and is used during final design. It involves techniques such as hydro-vacuuming or hand digging.

SUE quality levels. Each stage builds upon the previous one, improving the reliability of your data.

Why use SUE? To help your projects stay on schedule and within budget and to protect the safety of workers and the public. Contact Jeremy Chapman, GUY's new SUE Manager, to learn how we can help you with SUE services.

GUY adds dedicated SUE Manager

GUY has long offered our clients utility coordination services that included SUE Quality Levels D, C, and B. More recently, we began offering full SUE services in order to better help our clients reduce project risk and eliminates surprises at later stages of a project. To further improve the SUE services we offer you, GUY has added Jeremy Chapman to our Utilities department. Jeremy has nearly 20 years of experience in construction, utility coordination, and SUE. You can reach him at jeremy.chapman@GUYengr.com or (539) 424-5009 with any questions about how SUE can benefit your projects.

Jeremy Chapman, GUY's new SUE Manager

Stop by and see us at the summer ACCO conference! We will be in a hallway booth.