Driving past a building under construction with several piles of dirt heaved up alongside, the thought occurred to me that much of my best work is buried underground. Specifically, I'm referring to all the conduits and cable I have buried underground to serve buildings, and the miles of the same stuff I installed and buried under the concrete slabs of buildings.
By dint of either a weird fold in my genetic fabric
or some unnamed malady, "dirt work," as we termed it, was my favorite
part of the electrical work on a new building. My employer soon developed a
habit of having me and another coworker who excelled at operating a backhoe
perform all the underground rough-in for new projects.
We got pretty efficient at it and also strove for
accuracy in stubbing-up conduits so they landed inside future walls and
mechanical chases, where needed to feed panels and equipment. Placing as many
conduits for feeders and branch circuits as possible underground saved a lot of
labor and materials. First, you could often run diagonally across the building.
Additionally, you avoided a lot of the collisions with plumbing pipes and
ductwork that occur in the mechanical spaces in the ceilings above.
Good stuff. But nobody sees it.
—Mitchell Hegman
