Where's the Handhole?

Here's a pic of a pole a customer buried with concrete backfill.

His urd service was buried about 12' deep, along with our secondary box!
The customer ended up installing an OH mast after we told him it would take twice
the excavating that has already been done to find his service. We ended up changing out the pole
and abandoning the secondary and urd service!
It was quite the mess.

How did the thing end up getting buried so deep?? Wouldn't that be something; setting up shoring to repair a fault!

Ya'll use EMS markers in your handholes?

How tall was the pole?

The box was about 12' down. Shoring with that concrete would have been next to impossible!

The guys lot dropped down into a wash, and over the years he let the sewer contractors dump the concrete from the torn up drives, curbs, and sidewalks to fill his lot.

It was a 45' pole.

An EMS marker would have been nice, but we knew it was right by the pole, but when we found the top of it we made the decision to set a new pole, and let the customer know it would be cheaper for him in the long run.

He's gonna shit when he gets the bill!

I was assigned to do a safety check on all the U/G in the district. It was mandatory to do it every five years then but had been overlooked and never done before. I was on a mission to correct the U/G prints as well.

I approached one LPT (clam shell 1 phase) where it show it was on the print there was a 8' concrete retaining wall at the front of the property and a nicely landscaped yard on the other side of the retaining wall. They weren't happy to learn their retaining wall was on public property and at their cost it would be removed to expose the LPT. The municipality told the home owner that the retaining wall had to be removed, again at their cost because it was 7 or 8 feet on public property.

On the same task I ran into another situation where the property owner's contractor had excavated to near the roadway about 30' deep. it was all shotcreted to keep the walls of the excavation from caving in. There were about 10 workers below in the excavation. The live front transformer was precariously balanced at the edge of the property with a rope around it and that was tied to a piece of re-bar driven into the ground so it wouldn't fall into the excavation. The PVC duct was exposed but held in place by the shotctete. I phoned the WCB and the municipal electrical inspector. They did not have a permit to excavate the property although they did to build a house. What they were building did not resemble their submitted plan. Needless to say they were not happy with me.

What goes though some peoples minds??