Nothing Boring About It: Drilling Though a Maze of Underground Cables

Nothing Boring About It: Drilling Though a Maze of Underground Cables

A.R.E Utility Construction successfully buries a dozen conduits 43-Feet below street level.

By Linda Bridges

MIAMI, FL–Unbeknownst to most surrounding residents and businesses, A.R.E. Utility Construction, Inc. recently buried twelve 450-foot long conduits 43-feet below North Miami Avenue–without digging a lengthy ditch or disrupting utility service.

The 6-inch conduits will house power cables for a new Florida Power and Light (FPL) sub-station being built near the intersection of NE 20th and North Miami Ave. The challenge was to find and then create space underground for the pipes through a maze of existing cable, telephone, water, gas and fiber optic lines. To further complicate matters, the pipes had to go under railroad tracks, as well as the busy North Miami intersection. Two-way traffic was not interrupted.

Since ripping up the tracks and the road was not an option, A.R.E. was called in. A.R.E. is one of only a few horizontal boring companies in South Florida with the necessary equipment to handle a job such as this that requires an extraordinary amount of skill and precision.

To put it into perspective, an average horizontal boring job involves one 6-inch conduit, according to Steve Wertheimer, A.R.E.’s CEO. This job involved twelve 6-inch conduits-twelve times the average.

“If we cut a fiber line the cost could be $100K per minute,” said Wertheimer. “This job has been turned down by a lot of contractors because there are too many cables. I’m confident that A.R.E. can complete it successfully. We just have to be careful.”

A dizzying array of lines and chalk marks on the pavement indicate the first step of the process where each potential underground obstruction has been identified and located, including water, gas, phone, cable and fiber optic lines. By understanding the map below the surface, workers know precisely how far down the drilling needs to go, in this case, a total of 43 feet deep.

The boring machine entered the ground on the west side of busy North Miami Ave. and proceeded under the road and railroad tracks. A sensor is used to direct the drill. In this case, a more advanced wire-line drill head was used to circumvent frequency interference from existing fiber cables and other utilities. From here, the drill was guided underground, ripping through the hard earth below.

Due to solid rock conditions, it took several pre-reams to gradually make the hole large enough to fit the conduits. To create the 450-foot long hole, reamers varying in size from 12- to 36-inches were required.

The final phase of the project consisted of pulling twelve, 6-inch conduits through the hole.

It was a job that held lots of risk and around every corner was the possibility that something could go wrong. If the drill somehow got stuck, or if a line was hit, the four-week project would have to be started over from scratch–and all at great expense.

For A.R.E. the end result was a good one, with a minimum amount of traffic disruption to the neighborhood, an on-time project, and most importantly another project completed while maintaining A.R.E.’s high safety standards–in December 2001, the company celebrates its 16th consecutive month without any lost time due to accidents, and is still counting. For A.R.E. Utility Construction, Inc. it’s all part of the job.