Directional Drilling Insurance in Idaho

Idaho built its underground damage prevention system around a body that is deliberately not allowed to go looking for work. The damage prevention board can hear a contested case; it cannot start one. Cases arrive because somebody complained — and the statute lets that somebody be anyone at all.

That design shapes how a matter actually unfolds here, and it is the more consequential of this state’s two axes. The contract statute is short, draws its line at sole negligence, and is conspicuously silent on the subject most of its neighbors address expressly. Chapter 55-22 governs the complaint and §29-114 the clause. Neither describes the drilling, which is set out on the Directional Drilling Insurance pillar and the pollution liability page.

Two days, ten days, and paint before the phone call

Under Idaho Code §55-2205(1) the obligations run in a set order, and the first of them happens before anyone is notified.

Comply, then mark, then call. Paragraph (a) requires compliance with other applicable law and the permit requirements of any public agency issuing permits. Paragraph (b) then requires the excavator to pre-mark on-site the path of excavation with white paint, or as circumstances require by other reasonable means that will set out clearly the path of excavation.

Two escapes are written into the same paragraph, and both are documentary rather than physical. Pre-marking is not required if the facility owner or its agent can determine the location of the proposed excavation by street address or lot and block by referring to a locate ticket, or if the excavator and the owner have met at the excavation site before the work for the exchange of the information the subsection requires. On a linear route running between addresses, neither is automatic — and which one a crew is relying on is a fact worth recording at the time rather than reconstructing later.

Then the window. Under paragraph (c) notice of the scheduled commencement goes to all underground facility owners through a one-number notification service, communicated not less than two business days nor more than ten business days before the scheduled date for commencement, unless otherwise agreed. Where no one-number service is available, notice goes individually to owners known or suspected to have facilities within the area of the proposed excavation.

The ceiling is the half that catches crews from longer-horizon states. Ten business days is a short outer bound, so a ticket pulled while a job is still being planned will frequently be outside the window for the date the schedule assumes and will have to be pulled again.

The facility definition, and the pipe it leaves out

Section 55-2202(26) defines an underground facility as any item buried or placed belowground for use in connection with the storage or conveyance of water (unless being delivered primarily for irrigation), stormwater, sewage, electronic, telephonic or telegraphic communications, cable television, electric energy, petroleum products, gas, gaseous vapors, hazardous liquids, or other substances — and provides that the term includes pipes, sewers, conduits, cables, valves, lines, wires, manholes, attachments, and those parts of poles or anchors belowground.

Communications and cable television are named, so a fiber build is inside the chapter on both sides: the conduit being placed and the plant most likely to be struck.

The parenthesis is the part to read twice. Water being delivered primarily for irrigation is outside the definition. In a state with this much irrigated ground that is a substantial class of buried pipe carrying no protection under the chapter — which means a strike on it is not a damage-prevention matter at all, and whatever liability follows is decided somewhere else entirely. A route crossing agricultural land is a route where some of what is underfoot is outside the system the rest of this page describes.

A board that cannot start a case

Section 55-2211(1) contains a structural limit that shapes everything downstream: the damage prevention board established in §55-2203 may hear, but may not initiate, contested cases of alleged violations involving practices related to underground facilities as set out in rule by the board.

So where do cases come from? From complaints — and the door is wide. Complaints may be made by any individual and are made to the administrator. A complaint must give the name and address of the complainant and of the alleged violator and state the violation alleged; where the alleged violation involves facility damage or a downtime event it must be on the forms and carry the information the board requires by rule.

That is a wider door than most states open. In several the complaint must come from an affected operator or from an agency. Here a passer-by who watched a crew work can begin the process, which enlarges the audience for how a job looks from the street well beyond the parties to the contract.

And the roles are separated. On review of the complaint and any investigation conducted with it, the administrator notifies the complainant and the alleged violator in writing of the administrator’s recommended course of action to the board. The body that investigates and recommends is not the body that decides — so by the time a matter is heard, the record has already been built by someone else, and the contractor’s opportunity to shape it sits with the administrator rather than at the hearing.

A first violation is a course, not a bill

Section 55-2211(1) sets the default disposition: the administrator shall recommend that a training course adopted by the board by rule be successfully completed for a first violation of the chapter, subject to an exception where the complaint is a first violation involving a residential homeowner or residential tenant.

For a commercial boring contractor that changes the arithmetic of a first matter. The likely outcome is a course rather than a penalty, which makes early and cooperative engagement with the administrator cheap and makes fighting a first complaint expensive relative to what is at stake.

It also changes what a second matter looks like. A first violation resolved through a completed training course is a resolved violation on the record, and the history the administrator reviews on the next complaint is not a blank one. The value of closing the first matter properly — completing the course, and being able to show it — is realized entirely at the second.

Underwriting for the complaint, not just the strike

The contractors who reach us in Idaho are usually mid-project, holding a certificate a prime has refused and an agent who cannot explain why re-issuing it will not help. What is different here is who is watching. Because §55-2211 lets any individual file the complaint that starts a case, and because the board cannot open one on its own, the exposure that develops on an Idaho job is generated by observers rather than by regulators — and the first one usually ends in a training course if it is engaged rather than contested. Treat the administrator as the audience, and close the first matter properly.

Pollution liability sits outside chapter 55-22 entirely. The chapter governs damage to facilities and the complaint process that follows; drilling fluid surfacing into a river, a canal or an irrigation ditch is an environmental loss the general liability form excludes — and in this state an irrigation line may not even be a protected facility, which separates the two questions further than usual. Contractors equipment matters because a ten-business-day ceiling forces re-ticketing on a slipping job, and re-ticketing is standing time. General liability is specified against the contract, and the contract statute here is quieter than most.

A short statute, and the subject it never mentions

What §29-114 does. Idaho Code §29-114 makes against public policy, void and unenforceable a covenant in or collateral to a contract relative to the construction, alteration, repair or maintenance of a building, structure, highway, appurtenance and appliance — including moving, demolition and excavating connected therewith — purporting to indemnify the promisee against liability for damages arising out of bodily injury or property damage caused by or resulting from the sole negligence of the promisee, its agents or employees, or indemnitees. By its own terms the act does not affect or impair the obligations of contracts in existence when it took effect in 1971.

The line is sole negligence. Where a prime is partly at fault and you are also at fault, this section is not what answers the question, and a broadly drafted clause can survive it. That is the same line Maryland and South Carolina draw and a narrower one than New York, Connecticut or Louisiana draw.

What the section never mentions is insurance. Most statutes in this family carry a proviso stating that they do not affect the validity of an insurance contract, a workers’ compensation agreement, or an agreement issued by an insurer. Rhode Island has one. Maryland has one. South Carolina has one. Section 29-114 has none — no savings clause, no exclusion, nothing on the subject at all.

We are going to report that as an absence and stop there. It would be easy to argue in either direction from a gap, and both arguments would be inventions. The legislature addressed indemnity and did not address insurance, and what an Idaho court would make of an additional-insured requirement sitting beside a void indemnity clause is not something we have found an answer to. If your subcontract carries one, that document is doing work the statute has not spoken to.

And the scope question is open, as it is across this family. The enumerated work is a building, a structure, a highway, an appurtenance and an appliance, with excavating connected with those. Highway is there, and much fiber is placed in a highway right-of-way. But the list is shorter than several neighbors’ — no road, and no closing catch-all for other improvements to real property — and excavating is reached as work connected with a listed item rather than as its own category. We have not located an Idaho decision construing that language as applied to utility, linear or fiber work, and we will not supply one by inference. Everything above about sole negligence and about the missing proviso holds whichever way it is eventually decided.

Chapter 55-22 gives a board that cannot open its own case and §29-114 a contract rule that never mentions insurance. Between them they leave most of an Idaho account undescribed, and the remainder is on our Idaho fiber contractor insurance page.

Why Fiber Optic Guard Insurance

What we actually do on an Idaho file: check that the ticket sits inside the two-to-ten business day window for the date work will genuinely start, because the ten-day ceiling voids an early ticket; establish which pre-marking escape under §55-2205(1)(b) the crew is relying on and make sure it is evidenced, since both are documentary; treat a first complaint as a training matter to be engaged with the administrator rather than contested, because that is the default disposition and the record it creates is what the next complaint is read against; check whether anything on the route is irrigation delivery, since that pipe sits outside the chapter’s definition altogether; and read the subcontract knowing §29-114 stops at sole negligence and says nothing whatever about insurance. If a prime is requiring an additional-insured endorsement, send it — in this state the statute will not decide that question for you.

Frequently asked questions about Idaho directional drilling insurance