Underground utilities
Wet utilities are priced by the foot and won or lost on the backfill. Anyone can lay a pipe on grade. What separates one trench from another five years later is whether the bedding was right, whether the backfill was compacted in lifts, and whether the patch over it is still flush with the street.
What we install
- Water main, services, meters, valves, hydrants, and hot taps
- Sanitary sewer main, laterals, cleanouts, and manholes
- Storm drain, catch basins, inlets, junction structures, and outfalls
- Joint trench for dry utilities, with the conduit and boxes to the utility standard
- Potholing and locating ahead of design or ahead of a crossing
- Trench restoration: base, patch, and permanent pavement to the agency detail
Depth, shoring, and staying out of the paper
Anything over five feet deep that people enter is a shored trench, full stop. We run trench boxes and hydraulic shores to twenty feet, our foremen are competent-person trained, and the box goes in whether or not anyone is watching. It is also faster: a shored trench does not need laid-back slopes, which means a narrower trench, less spoil, and less backfill to buy.
Bedding and backfill
Pipe goes on bedding sand or the aggregate the spec calls for, hauled in on our trucks, and gets shading up over the crown before anything heavier lands on it. Backfill goes in lifts and gets compacted, and where the trench is in a street, the top of it is a structural section rather than whatever came out of the hole.
A trench patch that settles is the most visible failure in this trade. It is also almost always a compaction shortcut, which is why we would rather price the backfill honestly than be back with a grinder next winter.
Crossings, live utilities, and the 811 ticket
Every job starts with a ticket and ends with a potholed crossing. Where we cross a live gas main, a fiber trunk, or a district water line, we expose it by hand or by vacuum first and we tell the owner we are working near it. That is slower on paper and much faster in practice than the alternative.
What underground runs
| Item | Range |
|---|---|
| 8 inch sewer main, trench through backfill | $95 to $190 per LF |
| 8 inch water main, trench through backfill | $85 to $170 per LF |
| Storm drain, 18 to 36 inch | $130 to $320 per LF |
| Standard manhole, set and connected | $5,500 to $12,000 each |
| Catch basin or curb inlet | $4,000 to $9,000 each |
| Potholing, per hole | $450 to $1,100 |
Unit ranges are what this kind of work has been going for in the Sacramento Valley, put here so you can sanity-check a budget. They are not a bid. Quantities, access, haul distance, and the spec move every one of them.
Questions we get
Yes, on our scope. We pull the encroachment permit, submit the traffic control plan, and carry the bond the agency asks for. On a public works contract that is usually already in the specifications and we follow it.
Most of what we do is in a live street. Plated at night, open by day, with steel plates rated for the traffic and a phasing plan that keeps driveways reachable. On a main arterial, night work is often cheaper for everyone once you count the traffic control the daytime version would need.
We do them: lateral from the house to the main, connection at the main, abandonment of the tank to the county standard, and the yard put back. It is one of the more common calls we get in older parts of Chico and Oroville.
Twenty feet with our own shoring. Deeper than that we bring in an engineered shoring system and a design, which is a line item rather than a problem.
Photos are stand-ins until our own job photos are up: public domain images from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Park Service, plus freely licensed photos from Wikimedia Commons (CC0 and CC BY-SA 4.0).
Request a bid: underground utilities
Scope, rough quantities, the town, and when the site is available. If there is a bid date on it, put the date and time in and we will confirm receipt the same day.
- The yard
- (530) 555-0142
- Bids and plan sets
- bids@northstateconstruction.com
- Where we work
- Butte, Glenn, Tehama, Colusa, Shasta, Sutter, and Yuba counties
- Yard at 4180 Midway, Chico, CA 95928
CSLB Class A General Engineering · license pending, expected June