During cold weather, not only can inside water pipes freeze up and burst, so can underground water pipes. For some projects, this means you either need open cut repair work done or horizontal directional drilling. Or course with either method, or even if you want to try to repair damage yourself, you need to call ahead and have utilities mark the ground before you dig, to avoid cutting utility lines: electricity, cable, phone, and other companies.

Open Cut Repairs

Open cut repair work is the old fashioned way; dig a whole, mess up the yard and landscaping, complete the repairs, fill in the hole and go. For this type work, you would need to call general contractors by seeking referrals from neighbors and friends, looking in the Yellow Pages or other advertising materials you have locally, or check with your local hardware for recommendations.

Gather bids from a couple of different sources to compare. And check their credentials, references and previous work by following up with phone calls before hiring.

Horizontal Directional Drilling

To avoid so much damage to your property and landscaping, you may want to check into horizontal directional drilling (HDD) contractors in your area. With HDD, the repair equipment sits stationary off to the side of your work area, while long, horizontal piping drills head on into the area for repair work, similar to a surgeon using tools to operate. Results are repairs with little to no damage to the outside are surrounding the project.

To see if this horizontal type of drilling would work for your own situation, contractors would check the following information:

• They would need to know the required slope of the project and could work with your local contact to determine this.
• They would need to know if the area's geotechnical situation or condition was right for the project and would know how to check this out.
• They would need to make sure your municipality permitted this type of work, and would know who to contact to find out.
• They would need to know if this work would interfere with any municipal services or utilities that are already existing and would also know how to find this information out.

So before you dive in to repair burst underground water pipes, even if you know how, call all utilities first to get ground marked. And if you do need help, get some!

About the Author

John Mayer owns FloodCheck USA which can help you prevent water damage should your pipes ever burst. You can see a full line of home protection at burst water pipes

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