What they mean by “find them” is hooking up a Pipehorn, Vivax, or RDX locator to put a signal on the pipe or tracer wire so it can be marked out.
That’s providing if on steel pipe the bonding cables are intact wherever there is a Dresser fitting, or on the anodes. On plastic, you have to deal with tracer wire that may have been damaged, or the lead removed by some bonehead property owner who thinks it’s just a useless wire sticking up out of the ground.
There is also old pipe in the ground that was installed back in the days before accurate records keeping were required. That means hand drawn maps drawn by people who are no longer alive and maps that no longer match current road alignments.
So yeah they have to sometimes “find them”.
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>> “Regulators accuse California utility PG&E of falsifying (safety) records on natural gas pipelines” <<
I can attest that this is the direct opposite of what is happening!
Records of malfunctions are entered automatically by multiple sensors.
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