HAMPTON, Va. (WAVY) — “Call before you dig.”
As you know, state law requires that utility lines be professionally marked before groundbreaking. But one small business owner said he waited two weeks for a locator, which cost him his business.
“I used to work in an office. [the pandemic] It's in the heart of the city,” said Erin Snyder Dixon, who runs a landscaping business and builds homesteads for people who want to live on the land. “We had extra staff. Now we don't have any additional staff and we don't have any additional funding.”
Dixon's job involves digging, but to find gas lines, he first has to call Virginia Natural Gas. If you don't, the fine is up to $10,000.
“And I spent the day working on a time-sensitive project and having to finish it,” Dixon said. “We waited and waited and waited and waited. They just didn't show up, so I located for three hours and they didn't show up. And I located for another three hours and they just didn't show up. He didn’t show up.”
Normally VNG would have apologized and scheduled another appointment. But soon, Dixon stopped responding to me at all. When the locator finally showed up at the project, she asked what was going on.
“He said he normally has hundreds of tickets to sort through to go out and mark,” she said. “At that time, he had his 500 tickets and they had to be processed within a week. And that was on Thursday. Locators work 24/7. They… We're working after dark. It's crazy. But there aren't enough of them.”
And that's taking up a lot of Dixon's time.
She has to pay her employees to stay on site in case the detectors show up. Every time you're late, you lose another $200 in unfinished work. She spent $4,000 just waiting, she said.
“We ran out of money,” Dixon said. “And now we're on the scene for five, six, three hours, and I told them I can't sit there and wait any longer.”
After being contacted by WAVY News 10, parent locator Southern Company reached out to Dixon. She said they had a positive conversation where they acknowledged there was a problem and planned to make changes. Dixon said VNG currently has no outstanding tickets to deal with, but he is optimistic that things will improve in the future.
