Buried beneath every American city is a mysterious tangle of cables, pipes, and gas pipes that tangle together like a pair of wired headphones when you take them out of your pocket. Every time contractors sink shovels into the asphalt, they embark on a high-risk obstacle course of point-by-point excavation, avoiding spaghetti-like color-coded clusters of electrical wires, gas pipes, sewer lines and fiber optic cables. A line of blue spray paint represents water. Red means strength. Yellow is gas. Orange is telecommunications.
Problems occur approximately 700,000 times per year, or once every 47 seconds.
A backhoe cuts into electrical cables and knocks out power to a 911 call center, or a woman comes home to find her dryer and water heater on fire after a contractor punctured the wires. Just last week, a contractor accidentally severed a telecommunications cable that proved critical for flights at some of the largest U.S. airports ahead of the United Nations General Assembly, causing delays even for world leaders like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
The ground beneath our city streets has never been more crowded, driven by a fierce race for fiber optic cables to carry the data that populates your social media feeds and transmits your ChatGPT queries. The systems we use to find safe dig sites (i.e. the hotline and all the colorful spray paint) have also never felt so disastrously inadequate.
“If the locator incorrectly marks the line, if the line isn’t marked, if there’s no map that says the line is there,” said Sarah Magruder Lyle, president of the Common Ground Alliance, an industry association focused on underground damage prevention, “before the excavator puts the shovel or backhoe into the ground, all kinds of problems can occur.”
According to Common Ground, such incidents cost the United States an estimated $83.2 billion annually, roughly equivalent to the annual investment we make in public transportation nationwide. But the financial toll may actually be higher, as construction can be delayed for months every time a crew stumbles upon a mislabeled electrical wire or gas pipe that someone else has forgotten about. As Magruder Lyle said, “If they go out and find something they shouldn’t find, you have to go back and redesign the whole project.”
Such accidents can also lead to tragedy. Last spring, a 5-year-old Missouri boy named Alistair Lamb was killed when his unsuspecting father flipped a light switch, spewing smoke that leveled his house when he drilled a hole in a gas line near his home. Just this past May, a contractor struck another unmarked natural gas pipeline, killing three people and causing an explosion at a Dallas apartment building.
Yet the underbelly of our cities’ chaos remains largely invisible, with responsibility for the problem imposed and sometimes evaded by a phalanx of private utility companies, agencies and contractors that blame each other. This is a shame because the truth is, there is a better way to bury the cables and pipes that our modern lives depend on, and there are many better ways to find the cables and pipes that we have buried.
Disney World’s Right Look at What We’re Buried in
For a utopian vision of how this all works, look no further than The Happiest Place on Earth. In my opinion, Disney World earned its nickname not because of its Mickey Mouse waffles (although my niece might disagree), but because of its world-class utility corridors, also known as utility corridors.
Directly beneath the Magic Kingdom is a massive network of tunnels. Originally designed to protect Mickey and his friends, this system is now one of the largest utility corridors ever built. Unlike other parts of the country where cables are often dumped in ditches before being covered in dirt, the wires that power Cinderella Castle do get the princess treatment.
In addition to water pipes, sewers and animatronic control systems, these power lines are attached to utility walls and ceilings, meaning they are protected from weather and soil changes. They are also easy to monitor, catalog and access if there is a problem that needs to be fixed. While the upfront cost of building such a controlled system is much higher than burying it directly underground, the practice virtually eliminates the risk of accidentally rupturing a gas main or cutting fiber optic cables during routine maintenance. Once built, they can also significantly reduce costs in the long run because you no longer have to tear down streets every time utilities need repairs.
“Obviously, it’s expensive, but in the long run it’s going to be much cheaper,” said Debra Laefer, a professor of civil and urban engineering at New York University, especially “in areas where we’ve been digging, there’s a direct business reason to switch to these utilities.”
While Disney World’s imagined system looks fantastic—and, to be clear, is based on a master plan that’s not easily replicated—the idea of storing utility lines in easily accessible tunnels doesn’t just apply to amusement parks. This is possible even where most lines are currently buried in the dirt, as Prague proved in the 1970s when the city decided it was tired of destroying its precious cobblestone streets every time it needed to repair buried pipes or cables. The city now has a vast network of utility tunnels, apparently occasionally patrolled by a few robot dogs tasked with mapping each cable.
Singapore has also spent years building walkable public corridors that operate similarly to the Magic Kingdom’s, safely transporting water, data and energy through well-organized underground tunnels. Some of Tokyo’s largest districts store electrical cables and gas pipes in giant concrete utility pipes, and many of Paris’s water pipes and fiber optics run through the city’s centuries-old sewer system, a catacomb of garbage that’s easy to navigate via blue-and-white street signs that correspond to the avenues above. Many college campuses in the United States also have their own extensive public facilities.
In most cases, cities choose not to relocate utilities immediately, a feat that can be financially prohibitive and severely disruptive. Instead, they took advantage of all the time they needed to relocate utility lines, a standard (and expensive) practice on large construction projects like the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing or the Second Avenue Subway, a major transportation project in New York City that has been delayed by unplotted utility lines. A group of graduate students found that building such a tunnel through parts of New York City would likely cost at least twice as much as laying utility lines underground, but could pay for itself in 47 years.
“Some streets in New York City are dug up at least once a year and have been every year for the past 30 years,” Laffer said. If you just prioritized those streets and collected the pipes in “big concrete boxes” underground, you could have workers do most of the repairs without disturbing the streets or sidewalks above at all.
But building new utility tunnels requires us to first better understand the wires and pipes that already tangle beneath our cities, and if you recall, we only have a surprisingly fragile picture of most cities today. But if every surprising utility line is an opportunity to move it to a better place, it’s also at least an opportunity to identify its location.
To that end, several years ago, Laefer led a $1.2 million pilot project funded by the National Science Foundation to create a 3D mapping test case for New York City’s underground utilities, which was later incorporated into a citywide initiative. The city said it plans to roll out an improved utility location system in 2028. A few years ago, the UK launched a similar digital map covering more than 3 million kilometers of underground pipes and electricity owned by hundreds of utilities and agencies. The country expects to save more than $500 million annually by minimizing delays and unintended damage. Where Singapore has yet to put utilities into pedestrian tunnels, the city’s own mapping and utility coordination has saved an estimated $230 million since 2024 in avoiding conflicts. That’s pretty good for an intervention that doesn’t even require any physical reconstruction.
So why doesn’t every American city follow London or Singapore’s lead?
Well, compared to countries like the UK, American cities tend to be plagued by more private utilities and a patchwork of local and state codes and regulations. Getting them to bring together subsurface data they often consider proprietary is challenging, and few local officials choose to prioritize such efforts. But as more fiber goes underground, more flights are canceled, more apartment buildings explode, more power lines flicker, more sinkholes form, and more Americans become familiar with the dangers lurking beneath our feet, that’s likely to change.
“I think at this point it’s more about political will and money than any technical hurdles,” Laffer said. “Technically, we’ve done it. It’s just a matter of doing it.”