Finally came around on using a GPS tracker on my cutterhead after the Cape Fear job

I always figured those trackers were just another expense for the office guys. But after we had a close call with a buried gas main near the Cape Fear River last month, I saw how the operator ahead of me used one to avoid it. The foreman pulled up the overlay on his tablet and we were able to shift the cut by about 15 feet. Has anyone else had luck with those on older sites with bad mapping?

2 comments

2 Comments

mary6141mo ago

We had the same thing happen on a job near an old landfill. The maps showed nothing, but the tracker picked up a weird magnetic reading that turned out to be a buried steel pipe from the 1940s. Saved us a lot of headache and probably a fine. The older the site gets, the more those trackers pay off.

mary6141mo ago

You're totally right about the older sites being the ones that get you. We found an old cistern on a property from the 1920s that way, no records anywhere in the county files. The tracker hit a weird spot and we dug down maybe three feet and hit brick. Saved us from dropping a foundation right on top of it.