Permits & Process · February 12, 2026
What 'Call Before You Dig' Actually Catches
CBYD is free, required by Connecticut law, and saves real lives. Here's what it does and what it doesn't.
Connecticut law requires anyone planning excavation to call CBYD — Call Before You Dig — at 811 at least two business days before work. CBYD then notifies the participating utility members (gas, electric, telecom, water, sewer in some areas), who have until the start of work to mark their underground facilities. The service is free. Hitting a utility because you didn't call is a misdemeanor under CGS Section 16-345.
What CBYD catches
- Eversource gas mains and service laterals
- Eversource and Avangrid electric primary and secondary lines
- Telecom (Frontier, Comcast, etc.) buried cable
- Some municipal water and sewer where the utility participates
- Norwich Public Utilities (NPU) water, sewer, electric, gas in Norwich
What CBYD doesn't catch
Private utilities on private property — septic laterals, irrigation, low-voltage landscape lighting, private gas tanks, propane lines, private well lines, electric runs to detached garages or barns. Older municipal services that pre-date the utility's mapping. Abandoned-but-still-charged lines (rare but happens). The mark-out covers the utility's mains and the laterals it owns to the property line; what's inside the property line, on private feeds, is the homeowner's responsibility to identify.
What we do on top of CBYD
On every job we add: (1) a pre-dig walk with the homeowner to identify private utilities they remember installing, (2) a metal detector sweep on any line we expect to find but isn't marked, (3) hand-digging the first 12–18 inches around any marked utility before the machine touches it. The CGS code requires hand-digging within 24 inches of a marked utility; we treat that as a minimum, not a target.
Blasting near utility lines
Controlled blasting within 200 feet of a utility facility triggers a separate notification. For Norwich Public Utilities, that's the NPU Project Coordinator at (860) 823-4513 — the call has to go in before detonation and follow NPU's blasting procedure. For Eversource and other state-level utilities, the notification runs through CBYD and the affected utility's blasting coordinator. Skipping this step is the kind of mistake that ends careers.
Bottom line
CBYD costs nothing, takes two business days, and catches most utilities you need to know about. It's required by law for a reason. But it's not the whole answer — on every job, the difference between a clean dig and a 911 call is what you do after the marks are down, not whether you called.
Related services
Where we run this work
Have a job like this?