Underground utilities in Norwich: one owner, four services, one dossier.

Water is the simplest file in the drawer, and the one where age matters most. Plenty of Norwich housing predates modern copper service lines, and a corroded or undersized service shows up as pressure loss long before it shows up as a leak. We excavate to NPU’s tap, sleeve under walks and walls where the route calls for it, and bed the new line properly before backfill. The mechanics are the same as any water line installation we do across eastern Connecticut — what changes in Norwich is that the utility on the other end of the tap is a city department with its own inspectors, not a regional water company.

This is the busiest file. The lateral pipe under Norwich’s mill villages largely dates to the era of the housing above it, and a nineteenth-century village drawn on a tight street grid leaves no room for a sloppy trench. Sewer line installation here means a camera survey first, a permitted street opening where the lateral crosses the right-of-way, notice to the NPU Project Coordinator at least one business day before work, and a trench box in anything deep — mill-village streets don’t give you room to lay back slopes. One nuance worth knowing: NPU’s pipe is sanitary sewer. Storm drainage belongs to the city street system, so a wet basement is usually a drainage problem to solve on the private side, not a sewer problem.

Gas is the file where the division of labor flips. In most Connecticut towns a contractor runs customer-side pipe; in Norwich, NPU installs and maintains the entire run from main to meter outlet. So our role is earthwork and choreography: open the trench to their line and grade, hold the separations their construction standards require when gas shares a corridor with water or conduit, and close the surface — pavement, curb, lawn — to city standard when their crew is done. Conversions get scheduled through an NPU project coordination specialist at (860) 887-2555; we sequence our dig to their pipe crew so the trench isn’t sitting open for weeks.

Norwich generates its share of underground electric work — partly new construction, partly owners in the historic neighborhoods who want the overhead drop gone. Electrical conduit installation is our end: schedule-rated conduit at code depth, sweeps that a cable puller can actually work with, warning tape in the backfill, and pull boxes where the run turns. NPU’s standards govern the service connection and metering, and communications usually rides the same trench in its own conduit at its own separation. On a long rural-feeling drive up on the hills — Laurel Hill, Bean Hill — a joint trench for electric and comms is the difference between one mobilization and three.