For General Contractors

Underground scope on a schedule that holds, with locates cleared and the documentation your file needs.

Call (825) 479-1103 Book a camera inspection

Buried scope is the line item on your schedule most likely to move everything behind it, and it almost always moves for one reason: what was in the ground was not what the drawing said. A different material, a different depth, a service nobody recorded, a tie-in condition that changes the shoring. None of that is unusual. What costs a GC money is a sub who finds it at two in the afternoon and mentions it at five.

So what you are buying underground is predictability rather than pipe. That means converting the unknowns into knowns before a crew is committed — locates cleared, the existing line cameraed and sonde-located, material and condition identified, tie-in confirmed — and it means the phone call happens the hour a difference is found, while it is still a variation rather than a delay.

Then documentation, because underground is the one scope nobody can inspect after the backfill. Certificates of insurance and WCB clearance before mobilisation rather than in the second week. Pre-work and post-work footage for the closeout file. If it goes in the ground and there is no recording of it, the only record is the invoice, and an invoice is not a record of workmanship.

What the day actually looks like

Locates through Alberta One-Call before anything, on every job, without needing to be asked. Where there is an existing line in the scope it is cameraed and sonde-located before it is priced, which produces a depth, an alignment, a material and a condition. Pricing is then against what is there rather than against a record drawing, and where the two disagree you get told at tender rather than at mobilisation.

On site, the thing most often misunderstood about trenchless is the pits. Two pits still have to be dug. This is trenchless, not excavation-free, and the pits are real holes in real ground. They need shoring, they generate spoil, and they need a place in your site logistics like any other excavation. Between them nothing is touched, which is normally the entire reason the method was specified. The practical sequencing constraint is straightforward: pits want to go in before the hardscape and the landscape, not after, and a schedule that puts the underground behind the surface finishes has thrown away most of the advantage it was paying for.

What decides the scope

Length, depth, shoring requirement, host material and condition, access for equipment, and what is above the run on the day we are actually on it. A run under bare grade before landscaping and the identical run under a finished apron are different jobs at different numbers, and the difference is entirely in the reinstatement rather than in the pipe. Site congestion is the other one — a line that has three other services running close and parallel is a slower job than the same length in clear ground, and that gets established before pricing, not during.

Tie-ins carry more scope than they are usually given credit for. Existing connections along the run — a branch from a second building, a garage drain — are severed by the burst and have to be re-established separately. Whether the connection is to a live main, whether it sits under traffic, and which authority holds it are all scope items, and they belong in the pricing conversation rather than in an RFI three weeks into the programme. Where the answer turns out to be an open dig, the drivers shift to what that always needs: somewhere to put the spoil, and a plan for reinstating what gets removed. On a tight urban site that is occasionally the binding constraint on the whole method choice.

What people get wrong about this

Pricing buried scope from record drawings

Record drawings record what was drawn. On anything more than a few decades old the gap between the drawing and the ground is the normal case rather than the exception, and it is the single most common source of a variation on underground work. Price the survey, then price the pipe.

Treating the locate as the survey

A locate ticket establishes that a utility is present and roughly where. It says nothing whatsoever about the condition of the line you are tying into, its material, its grade, or whether it will accept the method that has been specified. Those are two separate exercises and only one of them is free.

Assuming any line can be burst

A path the head can follow. Severe offsets can stop it. A severely offset or deformed run can stop a pull partway, and finding that out with the head in the ground is considerably more expensive than finding it out on camera the week before. The specification follows the survey, not the other way round.

Building a window that assumes nothing is found

A programme with no allowance for a different depth or a different material is a programme that breaks on the first surprise, and underground work supplies surprises reliably. Carry the allowance, and take it back when the survey comes in clean — that is a far better position than needing it and not having it.

When this is the wrong answer

Chinook is a specialist sub, not a site servicing contractor. A full subdivision servicing package, deep municipal mains, or anything needing continuous crews and a full-time superintendent for months is not work we should be on, and putting us on it would add coordination without removing any of the risk you are trying to shed. We hold no gasfitting ticket, so gas is never ours at any point. On a clear site with nothing above the run, digging it is frequently the cheaper line item and we will price it that way rather than sell a method into a situation that does not need one — the case for trenchless is a reinstatement case, and where there is nothing to reinstate the case does not exist. And where the design calls for a new service along a new path, under a road or under a structure, that is specialist equipment we do not run in-house. We will tell you that at tender, in writing, rather than at mobilisation.

Coils and straight lengths of black HDPE water and sewer pipe stacked on timber bearers on a construction site. — New HDPE pipe staged on a site

Questions about general contractors

The ones that come up on this work specifically. The general questions are answered on the FAQ page.

Can you work to our programme?

Within the constraints of what is in the ground, yes, and the earlier we are in the schedule the more honest that answer is. What moves dates on this work is not us: locates have to come back before anything is dug, a line has to be cleaned before it can be assessed, and what the camera finds can change the scope. Where a date is critical, the sequence to use is survey first, scope second, book third. A trade that commits to a date before the survey is committing on your behalf.

Can you survey a line before we price the job?

Yes, and on a renovation or a change of use it is the cheapest thing on the schedule. A survey establishes what the existing lateral is made of, whether it holds its shape and where it runs — which is exactly what you need before anyone prices work that depends on it, or excavates near it. The sonde locates the line from the surface, which matters when the ground above it is about to be opened for something else.

What do you need from us before you are on site?

Access and a clear scope boundary. Where the line enters the building, where cleanouts are, what is running above and alongside the corridor, and who else is working in the same ground that week. If the run crosses anything that has been added since the line went in — a slab, a walkway, a new grade — tell us, because that is the kind of thing that turns a straightforward pull into a different job. Locates get requested regardless of what anybody remembers.

Nothing is quoted off a description

The camera goes down first and you keep the footage. If the answer is that there is nothing wrong with your line, that is what you will be told.

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