Underground utility line
Buried electric or phone cables under your yard.
What it is
A buried utility easement means electric or telecom cables run under your land in a marked corridor. Day to day you see nothing — no poles, no wires — which is exactly why these get discovered at the worst moment: a buyer’s title search, or a shovel.
The practical rule is simple: a crew must be able to reach what is buried without destroying what you built. Permanent structures over the corridor are generally out; lawn, gravel paths, and removable planters are usually tolerated.
How to check for it
- Look for surface clues: pad-mounted transformer boxes, valve covers, meter boxes, marker posts, or a suspiciously straight stripe of greener grass.
- Call 811 before any digging — it is free, and locators will mark the public lines on your lot.
- Check your title report for a recorded underground utility easement.
- Ask the utility for their easement and as-built maps for your parcel.
How to request maintenance
- The utility generally owns and repairs its own buried infrastructure — if you suspect a failing cable (flickering power, repeated outages on one circuit), call them.
- Before you dig for any project — fence posts, a pool, a garden bed — call 811 and wait for the marks. Hand-dig carefully near the marks.
- Photograph the area with dates before any utility work begins; restoration after a dig is generally the holder’s job, but “restored” usually means serviceable, not identical.
- If you plan improvements over the corridor, ask the utility for written consent first. Asking costs nothing; building first is how people lose a patio.
One free thing you can do today: Call 811 (or your state’s one-call service) before any digging. It is free, legally expected, and it tells you where things actually are rather than where the map says.
What you would do with this
This is an illustration of how the report is used, not an account of something that happened. Nobody here is a real homeowner, and what any particular situation is worth or costs depends on facts this tool cannot see.
- The situationYou are planning a deck footing or a tree, and you know there is something buried along the side of the lot but not where, or how deep.
- What the report showsThat excavation and deep-rooted planting are generally restricted within an underground utility easement, who is responsible for restoring your land after they dig, and what document should record the strip’s width — which usually turns out not to exist.
- What you doCall 811 before you put a spade in the ground, and ask the title company for the recorded instrument so you know the width rather than guessing at it.
- What that gets youThe footing goes somewhere that will not have to come out, and you learn the strip’s real width before you have built across it rather than after.
How it affects home value
Buried lines are invisible until someone digs, which cuts both ways: little day-to-day effect on value, and a real risk of discovering the easement at the worst moment — when a buyer’s title search finds it, or when you have already paid for a pool design.
When this goes wrong
The strike that didn’t have to happen
What happened
In 2025, the Common Ground Alliance’s Damage Information Reporting Tool logged 221,717 unique incidents of damage to buried utilities across the US and Canada — a record high. The industry group estimates the total economic cost of striking buried lines at $83.2 billion a year once outages, emergency response, and repairs are counted.
Why it happened
The leading root cause, year after year, is failure to notify 811 before digging — 22.3% of 2025 incidents. The mechanism is always the same: someone digs where a buried line runs, without having it located first.
Could this happen at your property?
Any digging project on your property — fence posts, a new patio, a tree — carries this exact risk if buried lines cross your lot and nobody calls 811. The 811 call is free and is the standard protection against it; the incidents above are what the unmarked dig looks like at scale.
Sources
Keep in mind
These are the arrangements that are usual for this kind of easement. They are not a reading of your easement document and not legal advice — your document controls, and it can say the opposite of anything here. Use this to work out which questions are worth asking, then confirm the answers against the recorded instrument or with an attorney licensed in your state.