This week I went out to Deer Haven Park with my supervisor and 2 professionals from the city of Delaware. The long term plan for the project is to map out the locations of the utility lines on all of the preservation park’s properties, which can be done using a tool owned by the city of Delaware. So, today we went out so that I could learn how to use the equipment, get some experience with it, and discuss the best methods of moving forward for the project.

The equipment works by connecting one machine to an exposed part of the line that you want to find. If I understood correctly, that machine sends a current through the pipe at a certain frequency so that it runs along the whole line. Then, using a separate machine that is set to that specific frequency, we are able to find the frequency and therefore the location of the line by following the strength of the frequency above ground. To follow it, the second machine is swept over the ground to find where the frequency is being picked up the strongest.

We ran into some issue because the separate utilities seem to overlap or be connected in the places where we can initially connect the lines, meaning that the current  was going through multiple lines at once and it was difficult to distinguish which one we were following. The other issue is that, because of the mechanics of the process, the pipes have to be metal in order to detect them. For most of the lines this isn’t an issue, but for the water line we can only track it for as far as it is copper.

The next step for this project is that we are going to try to get the building plans for the different properties to get an idea of where the lines go in and out of the buildings and also to see if the lines were possibly marked on those maps. Then, I’ll use the utility line locator and a GPS unit to mark the lines for the different locations.