I find stuff all the time that is not marked. Over half of the time it is an old line that has been abandoned.
That reminds me of the time I was setting a pole in an elderly gentleman's yard. I was hand digging the hole with a pair of 10' post hole diggers as he was telling me that there used to be a huge tree right where I was digging. The other guys in my crew were fiddling with our locator as there were no locates in the area.
I was steadily pulling out chunks of wood and roots from the old tree. At roughly the 4' mark I hit something tough. I though it was just a big root that wasn't rotten like the others. I smashed away for 5 or ten mins before I stuck my arm and head down into the hole to see what was going on.
I held the flashlight in my mouth and started to uncover what I was hitting, at first I saw just what I thought a big blackish tree root running in the middle of the hole... Then I saw the familiar glint of copper and aluminum tape.
I had chopped nearly a quarter of the way into a
copper cable as thick as my forearm! I nearly crapped myself, I wanted to crawl into the hole head first and die.
I got up and yelled to the other guys, we all got panicked and started pointing fingers. Huge argument ensued before we got out the plats. Nothing on the plats indicated any buried cable in the area at all let alone copper, this neighborhood was all aerial fiber.
We called the boss and I started digging a splice pit by myself while the other guys sat in the truck. I had to chop out the entire buried root section of what seemed to be an ancient tree with a blunt axe. Once I had dug the hole big enough for even the fattest splicer to sit down in I started cleaning and inspecting the cable.
It was most assuredly cut, but when I brushed my fingers over the end I didn't feel any tingle, nothing, I was thinking to myself... "hmm no house alarms went off in the surrounding area" (first thing that happens when you cut a cable if they are there). At that moment my super pulled up in his truck rolled the window down and said. "That cable was abandoned in the 60's, cover it up and have a nice weekend".
It was 3:30, I filled a 5x5x4 ft hole in under 15 mins. :laughing: