Warren made us an awesome video while digging several hundred meters of trench at the Austin Huns Rugby Ranch.
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We can cut six inches wide by sixty inches deep!
Always Call 811 Before You Dig
Before any trench gets cut, the first call we make is to 811 — the national “call before you dig” line. It’s free, it’s required by law in Texas (and every other state) before digging, and it’s the single most important step in a trenching job. A few days after the call, the local utility companies come out and mark the approximate location of buried gas lines, water mains, electrical conduit, and fiber or telecom cable with flags or spray paint.
Skipping this step is how trenching jobs turn into utility outages, gas leaks, or worse. A single missed line can mean a neighborhood without power, a damaged water main, or a serious safety hazard for the crew on site. Calling 811 costs nothing and takes a few minutes — running a machine blind through unmarked ground can cost thousands of dollars and put people at real risk. It’s not optional, and it’s not something we skip even on land we’ve worked before.
Why Machine Trenching Beats Digging by Hand
Cutting a trench by hand with picks and shovels is slow, physically brutal, and hard to keep straight and consistent over long runs. A trenching attachment changes the math completely. Instead of a crew spending days hand-digging a few hundred feet, a machine can cut that same run — clean, consistent width and depth the whole way — in a fraction of the time.
That consistency matters as much as the speed. A hand-dug trench tends to wander in width and depth as the diggers tire or the ground changes. A machine holds a steady cut, which means pipe and conduit sit at the depth they’re supposed to, backfill is predictable, and there’s a lot less guesswork for whoever comes in behind us to lay utilities.
Running Multiple Utilities in One Trench
One of the most efficient parts of a well-planned trenching job is that you don’t need a separate trench for every utility. Water lines, electrical conduit, and communication or data lines can often share the same trench, stacked at different depths with proper separation between them. Electrical typically sits deeper than data/communication lines, and each utility is separated by enough backfill to meet code and prevent interference or damage between lines.
Running utilities together this way cuts down on how much ground gets disturbed, speeds up the overall project, and reduces cost compared to digging, backfilling, and re-grading a separate trench for every single line. It’s a big part of why planning the trench layout carefully before cutting — after the 811 locates are marked — makes such a difference in how smoothly the rest of the job goes.
If you’ve got a property that needs trenching done right — locates called, depths planned, and utilities laid out efficiently — reach out to iLandClearing to talk through your project.
