Types of Underground Work: A look at Colorado in 2024

Underground Utilities account for a greater share of all underground work in Colorado than Roads, Structures, and Landscaping combined.  This breakdown of all underground work last year in Colorado provides insights about the volume, scope, and types of projects going on. This is a high-level look at broad trends across general categories of work that occur underground. Subsequent posts and articles will explore each of these categories in finer detail. Each category is defined as follows.

Work Type by Volume of Activity.

Engineering represents the smallest category of underground work, accounting for just 4% of the total. This category includes general engineering, and subsurface utility engineering. This is involves a survey of existing underground utilities for planning or design purposes. Also included is geotechnical drilling, soil testing, and core sampling. Cleanup of contaminated soil is also included in this category, as it typically involves geotechnical analysis and site assessments.

The next smallest category is Roads at 5% of the total. This includes sidewalks, ditches, culverts, driveways, paths, and other asphalt and concrete hardscapes other than foundations. This type of work can involve removal, repair, replacement, or new construction of these kinds of surfaces. Also included are unspecified concrete pads, parking lots, and road grading.

Next is Landscaping at 11% of the total. This includes tree planting & removal, stump grinding, irrigation systems, retaining walls, xeriscaping, rototilling, ponds, shrubs. Trees and sprinklers constitute the vast majority of this category. Though sometimes associated with landscaping, fencing is part of the next category, Structures, due to its foundational requirements.

The second largest category is Structures & Buildings at 19% of the total. Included are fences, signs, utility poles, buildings & foundations, piers, decks, swimming pools, and solar panels. Even small things like mailboxes and signs have an underground component, and fences constitute the largest proportion of this total. Another trend is apparent in this data: utility pole construction (17% of Structures & Buildings) is about a twentieth of the underground utility activity. Newly developed areas are planned for underground utilities, and areas where utilities are overhead are transitioning them to underground. This is no doubt due to the long-term cost savings of maintaining utilities underground.

By far the largest category is underground utilities at 61%. These include the obvious things such as water, sewer, fiber, gas, electric, cable, and phone. Less obvious are steam, oil pipelines, fire-lines, and cathodic protection systems. 37% of this entire category is related to fiber, indicative of the tremendous scale of new infrastructure that is currently being implemented. Future articles will examine this distribution in much more detail. This distribution may seem uneven, but it underscores an undeniable trend: fiber infrastructure is to the 2020s what cable was to the 1980s, interstate highways were to the 1950s, and railroads were to the 1910s—a critical component and symbol of expansion and connectivity.