What To Do If You Find Purple Utility Markings On Your Lawn
If you focus on keeping your yard lush through lawn care efforts, you may feel like you know every square inch of grass. So if a weed or odd color shows up, you're going to notice pretty quickly. You might come home from work and find paint or flags marking your property and wonder why. It means a neighbor or utility company is planning an excavation project in the area, even if it isn't directly digging on your property, and a marking company found buried utilities on your property.
If you have enough different types of buried utilities near your property, you might see a rainbow of colors. Each color has a specific meaning regarding the type of buried line. If you find utility markings on your driveway or grass that are purple, it means the underground lines involve reclaimed water, irrigation, or slurry lines. The purple color may appear as paint on a stake, a spray painted line, or as a small plastic flag. You should leave the purple markings in place for 10 to 14 business days without mowing over them or moving them.
No matter where you live or which underground line marking company does the work, the colors are uniform across the United States and Canada. To have buried lines marked on your property, you should call 811 before digging any holes in the lawn. Each state or province manages its own 811 system, but the 811 service works in a similar manner everywhere, including following the same color system.
How to handle the purple lines before and during the project
Even if you dislike the look of the purple paint or flags, or worry that they're a safety hazard for kids and pets, you should not try to remove them right away. You should also avoid running a lawn mower over the area of the markings or moving the flags to mow and then trying to replace them. If you accidentally hit a flag or mow over a painted mark, call 811 for help.
The 10 to 14 business-day policy gives the entity or neighbor who requested the marked lines enough time to start the digging project. If you are doing any digging during the time the purple lines are marked, you should avoid digging within 24 inches on either side of the line. The fact that you have purple lines indicating reclaimed water, irrigation, or slurry lines doesn't affect the distance you should dig from the line. You should always use caution when digging around any marked lines, regardless of the color.
Once the required time expires, you can remove the markings, even if you didn't see any digging occur. Some utilities may mark all lines as far away as 150 feet of the digging project. Perhaps the entity managing the project couldn't start in time. The entity would have to call 811 again to have the lines re-marked after the 10-to-14-day time period.
What happens to the markings after the project?
Generally, the person or entity that called 811 to have the underground utility lines marked is responsible for removing the purple flags or stakes after the project is completed or after the waiting period. However, this may fail to happen, as the responsible party often skips this step and just leaves them behind. If so, the property owner has the right to remove them.
If you have paint on your grass, driveway, or sidewalk, it will eventually fade away through exposure to rain and sunlight over a period of two to eight weeks. If you want to remove the paint earlier, you can use a standard pressure washer with water alone. As the purple painted grass blades and weeds grow, a mower should remove the taller parts of the plants that have paint on them. However, if the paint is applied at a time of the year when the grass isn't actively growing, mowing won't work to remove the paint. You might be able to use a garden hose and sprayer or a pressure washer on a low setting to wash the purple paint from the lawn.