Underground Service Alert (USA) is an non-profit mutual benefit organization that links the excavation community and the owners of underground lines. Underground Service Alert has two separate call centers for California: Underground Service Alert of Northern California (USA North) and Underground Service Alert of Southern California (USA South, aka DigAlert). Although they are not affiliated and are run by separate boards of directors they share the common goal of safe digging. USA North handles Northern and Central California as well as Nevada. DigAlert handles nine Southern California Counties. Calls to either center is free for all homeowners, excavators and professional contractors who are digging, blasting, trenching, drilling, grading, excavating, or otherwise moving any earth.
USA began operation in 1976 and incorporated as a mutual-benefit nonprofit corporation in 1986. USA receives planned excavation reports from public and private excavators and transmits those reports to participating members of USA. USA members include private companies and public agencies that have underground lines or facilities. The USA members will either mark or stake their facility, provide information or give clearance to dig.
Famous quotes containing the words underground, service and/or alert:
“Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about....”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)