We need to make a law that keeps the price of copper low so these things don’t happen. >S<
Seriously, my son’s boss told him that if he didn’t call for a locate and he cut the phone cable, to just get off the machinery because it would belong to the phone company as would everything the company had.
We accidently cut a phone cable and they wanted to charge us a couple thousand dollars a minute that it was down but they had their cable on our private property and it was supposed to be and documented to be in the right of way and it was too shallow, to boot.
I was putting in anchors for overhead cable lines and ran one though the line.
The location was correct for what was on the map I was contracted to work from. The cable company's ins paid dearly for that.
They laid mine down in the same trench when they ran my power line along my driveway (3/4 mile). Last summer a bolt of lightning hit the ground directly over where they laid it. The power line was protected and blew the fuses on the transformer box, so that was fine, but the phone line took a direct hit through 2’ of dirt and melted the line along the entire length of buried cable. They sent a trencher team out to replace it and they only went about 6” deep. I know it’s only a matter of time before I hit the stupid thing.