To the editor:
I was out for my morning walk through Henderson Hills subdivision the other morning taking in the beauty of the wooded hills of Brown County, Indiana. Up ahead, I noticed a utility truck parked by the side of the road and a gentleman who was walking back and forth along the shoulder.
The man was holding something in his hands and pacing very evenly from the side of the road, stopping, and then marking the ground with spray paint and flags. It was obvious that he was marking the location of buried utility lines of some sort.
Curious as to what method or device he was using to detect the buried lines, I approached him and asked. Not hearing my approach, the startled man jumped about a foot in the air. After I introduced myself, he told me that he represented a contractor who was locating and marking the subdivision’s water lines for Bartholomew County water (our area’s utility).
When I expressed my interest in what he was doing, the technician gladly shared his methods. To my surprise, instead of holding up an electronic instrument for detecting magnetic fields or density of the soil, he grasped a couple of wires. He explained to me that the water lines were, in fact, plastic pipe, so there was nothing metallic or magnetic to detect.
The wire was about the gauge of a wire coat hanger. There were two pieces, one for each hand, about a foot long and bent in the shape of an “L.” He was holding one in each hand, grasping the base of the L and pointing them to his front like a pair of drawn pistols. Walking slowly away from the side of the road across the grass, he reached a spot where the wires suddenly rotated inward and were pointing directly at each other.
“Right here is where the water line is,” the man exclaimed, spraying the spot with aerosol paint and planting a marker flag. Of course, I was incredulous and skeptical of his claims but kept my reservations to myself. I could imagine no scientific principle that would support his method.
Perhaps sensing my doubt, the diviner told me, “I learned this method from a guy in the Brown County water department.” It was all I could do to stifle my laughter, since I had just read in the Brown County Democrat (2/27/20) about a dispute regarding water hookup fees between the new Brown County Music venue and the Nashville, IN, water department.
“The town does not have maps of where its utilities are underground, Cassiday [Nashville town utility coordinator] said. A former utility superintendent who knew where they all were has died, and that knowledge died with him, Gore [President, Nashville town council] said.
“When existing lines were ‘located’ at the music center building site, some assumptions were made, and while excavating, site workers hit a sewer line, said Jim Schultz, who helped supervise the building project. He said that the marked location, which was done by the town, was 95 feet off of where the line actually was.
“As a result, the music center incurred unexpected costs, including nearly $19,000 to rework the plan for Maple Leaf Boulevard, raise the road and bring in more gravel, said Doug Harden, who designed the project.
“The music center builders also had trouble finding a water line they could tap into, so extra labor went into that on the music center’s and town’s sides, Cassiday and Schultz said.”
I hope that our water utility never has to do any digging in our subdivision based on the markers posted by their contracted water witch!
John Drebus, Brown County
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