Groundbreaking excavation technology helping eliminate utility strikes

Electric and telecom cables and pipes carrying gas, sewage, water or petrochemicals are forming an increasingly dense honeycomb beneath the built environment. Underground utility strikes during excavation activities are responsible for dozens of deaths, hundreds of injuries and an estimated $50 billion in damages yearly.  

Preventing these strikes is a point of emphasis for Haskell’s Safety Department, which recently got an assist from Dysruptek, the company’s innovation and venture capital arm. 

Last year, Dysruptek became an early investor in RodRadar, an Israeli startup developing a disruptive sensor technology to detect underground hazards. Recently, Haskell became the first contractor in the United States to take delivery of RodRadar’s operationalized LDR Excavate digging bucket. 

Embedded in the bucket, the revolutionary Live Dig Radar® technology overcomes the limitations of existing technologies, detecting in real-time any type of underground utilities during earthwork at any depth. The bucket uses standard attachment systems and can be installed on any excavator. On the surface and during trenching, the LDR Excavate creates a new scan with each pass in different soils and types of substrates, consistently identifying targets in proximity to the bucket and alerting the operator to hazards without the need for expert analysis. 

“We’ve had a longstanding partnership with RodRadar's team. RodRadar's LDR technology is a game changer,” said Cutler Knupp, Managing Director of Dysruptek. “We decided about a year ago to be an alpha customer of the first LDR, and we’ve now taken delivery. We’ve validated that the solution does exactly what it says it does. The accuracy has been impeccable, and it's already helping Haskell to identify subsurface conditions that we were not aware of before.” 

Previously, utility locators could scan the ground with cart-mounted ground penetrating radar (GPR) technology to detect underground infrastructure, but that technology is limited by moisture, depth, soil composition and the size or composition of the hazard and requires expert or off-site data analysis. Embedding radar technology in the bucket solves many of these shortcomings. 

Haskell has deployed the LDR bucket to several sites, including the new Miller Electric Center, the Jacksonville Jaguars’ new sports performance center. Haskell is general contractor on the nearly $130 million facility. 

“We were able to test it in a number of ways,” said Lance Simons, Haskell Vice President of Safety & Quality. “We were able to verify where the utilities were and then know at exactly what depths they were buried. It's still early, but this is very promising. We watched it perform in real time. It’s extremely user-friendly for the operator.” 

In the early stages of commercialization, RodRadar is entering the market by positioning LDR Excavate buckets with a limited number of alpha customers worldwide. It then will collect real-world data and learnings and incorporate them in a refined product for wider release. 

“We’re pushing toward a future when LDR buckets will be available at your local equipment distributor and on every project site as a new standard,” Knupp said. “This problem plagues the entire industry across the globe, not just in the US. We finally have an opportunity to completely eliminate strikes, this is very exciting opportunity.”

“RodRadar is happy to continue its collaboration with the Dysruptek and Haskell team,” said Moshe Dalman, CEO and co-founder of RodRadar. “We gain a lot of insights that are focused on safety and damage prevention from their savvy and experienced team. It’s the right group to team up with when you bring a product that is truly disruptive to the market.” 

About RodRadar

RodRadar offers unique and unprecedented technology platform, which automatically detects underground utility infrastructure in real time, on location, without the need for expert analysis. RodRadar’s proprietary and patented ground penetrating radar technology, Live Dig Radar®, along with its line of products, facilitates a new ecosystem of synergetic services and solutions that are set to modernize excavation, increase operator safety, improve productivity, and introduce project efficiencies.

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