One call is free. Skipping it cost us four days without internet — while we were both trying to work from home.
The Story
We picked the spot for our new asparagus bed, pulled the sod, and started digging on a Saturday morning. A few shovels in, I hit something that wasn’t supposed to be there: a fiber internet line, buried a lot shallower than it should have been.
No injury, no real damage in the moment — just a dead internet connection and a stopped project. That would have been a fine place for the story to end. It wasn’t.
We work from home. No internet on a Saturday is an inconvenience. No internet Monday morning is a problem. The internet company couldn’t get out until Tuesday afternoon — four days working around no connection at the house.
Tuesday afternoon, they did a patch repair — not a real re-bury, just enough to get us back online. It held for a few hours. Then a rabbit ran through the yard, caught the exposed patch, and knocked us offline again for about a day. Once the internet was back up again, we added our own protection: a plastic storage box turned upside down over the repair, with a rock on top to keep it from blowing away. That’s what “temporary” actually looked like at our house for a while.
When the crew came back to do it properly, they didn’t just re-bury the same line in the same spot. They rerouted it to run along the house instead of across the yard, and buried it 18 inches deep — three times deeper than the 6 inches it had been at before. One detail worth knowing: because the original line had been buried so shallow in the first place, they didn’t charge us for any of it. That’s not a guarantee everywhere, but it’s worth asking about if this happens to you.
Asparagus is a permanent planting. Twenty-four crowns don’t move once they’re in. I knew that going in, and I still skipped the one call that would have shown me exactly where that line was before the first shovel hit the ground.
What 811 Actually Is
811 is the national call-before-you-dig number. One call (or a quick request online, depending on your state) gets every utility company with lines on or near your property to come mark them — gas, electric, water, sewer, and yes, buried internet and cable lines like the one I found.
- It’s free.
- It’s required by law in most states before digging, even on your own property.
- Utilities typically mark lines within a few business days — plan ahead, don’t call the morning you want to dig.
- They mark with flags or spray paint, color-coded by utility type, so you know exactly what’s where before the shovel goes in.
When to Call
Any time you’re breaking ground beyond the top few inches — a new garden bed, a fence post, a deck footing, a mailbox post, a tree you’re planting with any real root ball. If it involves digging, it’s worth the call. A raised bed sitting on top of the ground doesn’t need one. A new in-ground bed, especially a permanent one, does.
One call would have saved us four days without internet, a rabbit-severed repair, and a plastic box with a rock on it standing in for infrastructure. Cheap insurance for something you only get one chance to do right.