​Utility Mapping Service

My logo is “Seeing What You Can’t See” and producing accurate, affordable, and easily accessible utility maps for my customers has proven to be an invaluable service. The value of mapping utilities can be highlighted by a project I completed last summer for a building contractor at a public school in a small, rural town in Western Montana. After marking all utilities using EM and GPR locating methods between two school buildings where a new storm sewer line was going to be installed, I created the utility map shown below. 

The proposed route for the new storm sewer line is marked by the white dashed line. As shown, the new storm sewer line had to cross two buried utilities: a communications line (orange) and a buried electrical line (red). I also found an unknown line (marked in pink) which I marked coming out of the building on the right. The utility line could not be seen beyond the point which I marked the line because of new landscaping rock materials.

As the contractor was excavating a trench for the new line, he contacted a buried fiber optic line. He called me in a panic and told me that he hit a line that wasn’t marked. I pulled up the map I created and indeed the line was marked almost to the point of contact. However, after checking with the school and determining that no communication lines were affected, it was determined that the buried fiber line was installed by Mountain Bell and never put into service. I had informed the contractor before leaving the site that the line was not “locatable” beyond the point it was marked. We both got lucky because the line was never put into service, but at least I had discovered the line and informed him that I could not locate beyond the point I had marked it.

​Shown below is a large mapping project I completed in Yellowstone National Park last fall. The park service has plans to build a new employee dormitory near Old Faithful. The park service and the architect wanted to know where the utility lines were located prior to drawing up blueprints for the new dormitory. As you can see, this map is quite large and having a utility map of the proposed building area was very valuable to the park service. 

Using our GPR equipment combined with our EM line locating tool, we can locate your buried underground utilities and then accurately place them on a Google Earth image of your project area using Global Positioning Data (GPS) data to produce maps like the one shown below.

For more information on our “utility mapping” service,
please contact Brent Baumann at 406.579.3181
or visit our website at: www.geosearchservices.com

Read February 2022 Newsletter