How to read a locate ticket when the dig info is sloppy

Most locate tickets tell you what you need to know. The ones that don't are the ones that matter most, because a sloppy ticket usually means the excavator didn't think hard about where your line runs, or the one-call center typed it in fast between calls. Either way, the dig information you're staring at is a guess dressed up as a fact.

Here's what to check before you decide a ticket is good enough to file and forget.

The dig site description is the first tell

Open the ticket and go straight to the location text. A solid ticket reads like someone stood at the site: "south side of County Road 14, 200 feet east of the bridge, work area 40x60 along the fence line." A sloppy one reads like a mailing address with nothing else attached: "Highway 14, near bridge." No measurements, no reference point, no footprint.

That gap matters because your line doesn't run down the centerline of the road. It runs wherever it runs, and a ticket without a measured offset gives the locator nothing to lock onto. If the description could apply to three different parcels, treat it as incomplete and push back through the one-call center rather than letting it sit.

Watch the remarks field too. "Digging a hole" or "installing utility" tells you nothing about depth, method, or whether they're boring under the right-of-way or cutting across it with a trackhoe. Directional bore crossings and open-cut trenching carry very different risk to a buried line, and a ticket that doesn't distinguish between them hasn't given your locator enough to work with either.

Work type and dates that don't line up

Cross-check the work type against the excavator's own notes. A ticket marked "fence post installation" paired with remarks mentioning "trenching for conduit" is a contradiction, not a typo, and it usually means the person filling out the request didn't fully understand their own scope yet. Same with start dates. A ticket filed for work starting in three days but with a legal start date that's already passed means someone is racing the clock on their positive response window, which is exactly when corners get cut on the ground.

Positive response status is worth a second look on its own. If the locate is marked complete but the ticket never shows a white-lining reference, or the "clear" status came back the same morning it was requested for a large or oddly shaped polygon, that turnaround is worth confirming rather than assuming. Tickets don't lie on purpose, but they get rubber-stamped when a center is backed up.

What a thin ticket is telling you

A vague ticket means the paperwork trail has a gap, and paperwork gaps are where damage happens. The excavator rarely means to cause it. The problem is that nobody on your side had eyes on the dig site before the bucket went in. The ticket system was built to route notifications, not to confirm that an inspector walked the ground.

That's the piece most integrity teams still can't close. You can read every ticket that comes in on a given corridor and still have no way to confirm whether the described work matches what's happening in that field this week, short of a drive-by or a landowner calling it in after the fact.

Pipeline Threat Alert exists for that gap. It's built to flag machinery and laydown near your segments from weekly imagery, so a thin or contradictory ticket can be checked against what's sitting on the ground, not just what got typed into a dig-notification form.

If your tickets keep arriving half-filled-in, it might be time to stop relying on the paperwork alone to tell you when to send someone out.