Nobody has the as-builts: what our field reports show

Our technicians fill in a field report on every job. One of the questions is whether maps or as-builts were available on site.

Across our field reports from May to September 2026, the answer was no on 88% of jobs. On the large majority of sites, nobody could produce a drawing of what was in the ground.

What that means in practice

On almost 9/10 jobs, the locate is not a matter of confirming a drawing. It is the only record anyone has.

This is not unusual or anyone's failing. Drawings get lost in property sales, filed with a project that finished decades ago, or never made at all because the work was small. Lines get added, capped, rerouted and replaced, and none of that updates the original paperwork.

What makes a locate difficult

The same reports record the issues our technicians hit on site. The recurring ones are worth knowing about before you book anybody, because they affect what any locator can deliver:

• Poor or absent signal. The most common issue by a wide margin. Plastic pipe carries no signal, and a metallic line with a poor connection or a broken tracer wire can be little better.

• No tracer wire. Frequently noted on fibre, irrigation and newer plastic services. Without it, the line has to be found by other means or it is not found at all.

• No clean-out access. Common on sewer and septic work, where without an access point a sonde or push rod cannot be introduced into the line.

• Overgrowth and access. Blackberries, landscaping, locked gates, parked vehicles and fenced areas all limit what can be swept.

• Ground conditions. Saturated ground, heavily disturbed soil and congested sites all reduce what radar returns usefully.

An honest locator tells you where these limits applied on your site. Our reports record them by name, which is also why we can tell you what was not established rather than implying everything was.

Turning the locate into a record

If there is no drawing, the locate is worth keeping. RTK data collection captures the located lines as survey-grade coordinates, so the next project starts from a map instead of another search. On a facility with decades of changes, that is the difference between paying to find the same lines repeatedly and owning the information.

See how we mapped the utilities of a 40-year-old facility and an unmapped septic line under a planned shop.

Locating, verification and mapping

Advanced Underground Utility Locating has been locating private utilities since 2002. We locate the lines 811 will not mark, verify the public marks that were made, mark public lines that were missed, and capture findings with RTK where you want a record rather than paint.

Spokane, Coeur d'Alene and the Idaho panhandle: 509-710-2621. Seattle, Tacoma and Portland: 509-954-8623. Bend, Medford and northern California: 541-678-0629. Eugene and Roseburg: 541-780-4149. Coos Bay and the Oregon Coast: 541-315-6728.

Figures are taken from our own field reports for May to September 2026 and cover jobs across Washington, Oregon and Idaho. No customers or sites are identified.