Has anyone ever done this while working on your trapline?

I think the statute of limitations has passed from when I did it. I was shaving a bank just outside the mouth of a culvert. There was this root in the way that wouldn't budge. I pulled on it and hit it lightly a couple times with the tile spade but it wouldn't budge. It was all muddy and looked just like a tree root about a 1/2 inch in diameter. I finally put some force behind the tile spade. It cut it in half. I grabbed it to see if I could pull it out again when I saw all the little copper wires inside of it. I quickly decided I didn't need to set tht culvert.

I have almost done it a few times since then. It is amazing how many lines are buried by bridges and culverts.

Better then fiber or gas lol.

You didn't cut a big one if you did it with a tile spade

Them fancy colored tree roots are expensive.

Looked at a bat job this summer way out in the boonies. He said his phone line gets cut Everytime the township plows the gravel road....

Probably a drop to a house maybe 2. I'm in underground utilities and they hardly mark them now. Cheaper to run a new one then have their subcontractor mark them.

They're running Fiber all over here now, they run the line but dont bury it until the crew gets around to it, very inconvenient if you need to run a loader over the yard. I solved that problem in one yard by putting there cable 30' up in a couple trees and drove under it, left it there for them to figure out how to bury when they got to it.

They should know better than to bury phone lines in likely set locations. You are hereby vindicated.

Last time we cut a phone line cost us $3000.00.

We think a lot alike, wags.

In my line of work utility pipeline. Waterline, storm drain and sewer. It is a common occurrence to locate the power, gas and cable lines before we do heavy excavation. The fiber lines especially have put several businesses under for the cost of repairing. My dad pulled up to a job one time to get started and there was a fella leaning up against his excavator tracks. They exchanged good mornings and the man asked my father what he planned to do with his machine. My father replied lay some storm drain line with it. The man told him there was a high profile fiber optic line buried nearby that handled all of the credit card transactions for BP gas stations between Georgia and California. He kindly let my father know there has never been a small business that damaged the line that has ever stayed in business! My father asked the man how he knew it was there and how he knew he was about to start digging near it. The man replied that they flew the area over the fiber line with a helicopter every four hours. Needless to say my father never damaged the fiber line.

See me cringe as the PTSD kicks in thinking of cut cables, lol…

that was probably a good number of years ago
I had a instructor in night school that had that job , he flew a twin engine cassena in several hundred mile triangle every day over fiber runs watching for construction , road work , backhoes , drain tile work ect..

would radio it in and they would send someone out to check it out on the ground

at the time a splice was around a million dollars

then a guy came up with a bury able boot and brought the splice down to around 30K and just like that he was out of a job flying every day

splices cost less than that now

I work in phones and customers get things gut fairly often , but not as much as they used to

for a while there was a particular interchange in Kansas city that they seemed to cut a major cable every year for a while. the one year they didn't cut it the entire thing flooded and it failed that way.

Don’t work that way when you tear down or dig up a backbone FOC, we won’t bury splices. We, the carrier, eat the outage cost in our service agreements, fix the outage by placing a suitable replacement span, and pass the savings on to the irresponsible party. lol..

My favorite is the ding dongs complaining that their cell phones no longer work because the wireless networks were backhauled on a cut cable. lol…