Kentucky 811 Offers New Guidebook

A new guidebook is available to Kentucky contractors and excavators that details the process of locating underground utility lines.Within the last two years, a consortium of energy companies, the Public Service Commission and other parties interested in keeping their infrastructure buried started an agency called Kentucky 811 – it encouraged people to call 811 before digging, to locate said utility lines and avoid them.PSC spokesperson Andrew Melnykovych says a new guidebook now allows contractors and others to keep the information with them.“It pretty much covers all the things that anybody who’s in a position where they might be working near buried utility lines needs to know before they start actually putting a shovel in the ground," Melnykovych says.Most recently, he says, a construction crew in Boyd county hit an underground gas line, with the resulting fire causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.