Q. The road construction on Pauline involves putting in new fire hydrants. Each new hydrant has an electrical connection. What is it for?
A. That’s a tracer wire. It makes it easier to locate a buried pipe, so Ann Arbor now includes one whenever it installs a new water main. In the future, when workers need to locate the pipe, they can attach the connection to a “wire tracer” that causes the wire to emit a low-frequency signal (in a way that doesn’t require the wire to be energized).
Without a tracer, crews have to calculate the pipe’s location using measurements and location records. Pipes last a long while, sometimes outliving a house or a sidewalk. A dig based upon an incorrect measurement could be costly and even dangerous, if other buried conduits are damaged.
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