Apocryphal story: Back in the early 60's a farmer went out to dig out a stump of the middle of one of his fields. He didn't know about what else had been done to his property. Well the backhoe hit something relatively hard but not totally resistant. He thinks a large root bundle and keeps digging. The police and AT&T show up lights flashing and totally freaking out. He had cut through hundreds of wire pairs in a thin conduit. It was the main phone lines cnnecting the east and west coasts on the AT&T network. It took days to splice all the wire pairs together again. remeber there were no satellites and microwave towers were barely coming online at that time.
That is when they started building the 811 system.
That is when they started building the 811 system.