Directional Drilling Insurance in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania has an indemnification statute. It covers architects, engineers and surveyors — and, since 2022, snow removal. It does not cover the subcontract a fiber crew signs, and the act’s own title says as much.

That absence is not the end of the analysis, which is why this page exists rather than shrugging. What governs a Pennsylvania indemnity clause is a rule of construction laid down by the state’s highest court, and it is demanding enough that a badly drafted clause frequently fails on its own terms. Alongside it sits a dig law with a calculated start date most crews get wrong by a day or two. A rule of construction governs the clause and Act 287 the calendar. The bore they are scheduled around is set out on the Directional Drilling Insurance pillar and the pollution liability page.

What the statute covers, in its own title

68 P.S. §491 is the Act of July 9, 1970, P.L. 484, No. 164. Its title, amended July 11, 2022 by Act 68, describes it as an act “relating to indemnification agreements between architects, engineers or surveyors and owners, contractors, subcontractors or suppliers and indemnification agreements relating to snow removal or ice control services.”

Section 1 voids as against public policy any covenant whereby an architect, engineer, surveyor or their agents, servants or employees is indemnified or held harmless for damages, claims, losses or expenses including attorneys’ fees arising out of (1) the preparation or approval of maps, drawings, opinions, reports, surveys, change orders, designs or specifications, or (2) the giving of, or the failure to give, directions or instructions — provided that giving or failure is the primary cause of the damage.

Section 1.1, added by the same 2022 act, applies to snow removal or ice control services contracts, voiding a provision indemnifying the receiver of those services in defined circumstances.

A boring subcontract between a prime contractor and a fiber crew is neither an agreement indemnifying a design professional for design work nor a snow removal contract. On the face of the act, it is outside both sections.

And here is what this page will not claim. It will not tell you that no Pennsylvania statute anywhere reaches construction indemnity. We have not located one — and that sentence is deliberately weaker than the one a reader might want, because a negative of that kind cannot be established by retrieval. It can only be assumed, and assuming it is how a contractor ends up believing a protection exists, or does not, on no evidence either way. What is established is what §491 covers, because the act says so.

The rule that governs instead, and which court laid it down

The absence of a statute does not leave a Pennsylvania indemnity clause unregulated. It leaves it to a rule of contract construction — and that rule comes from the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

In Ruzzi v. Butler Petroleum Co., 527 Pa. 1, 588 A.2d 1 (1991), the court applied what practitioners call the Perry-Ruzzi rule: where a party seeks to be indemnified against its own negligence, the language of the indemnification provision must be clear and unequivocal. Words of general import will not accomplish it. There is no presumption that one party intended to assume responsibility for the negligent acts of another unless the agreement expresses that intent beyond doubt and by express stipulation. The rule reaches property damage claims as well as personal injury.

Note the court level, because it decides how much weight the rule carries: this is the Commonwealth’s highest court, not an intermediate appellate panel, and the rule is one of construction rather than of public policy.

The practical position for a boring contractor is close to the inverse of a statutory ceiling. In Montana or Louisiana a broad indemnity clause is void however carefully it is drafted. In Pennsylvania nothing forbids the clause — but a clause that does not say plainly and unmistakably that it covers the other party’s own negligence will not be read to do so, and it is read strictly against the party seeking the protection. Drafting decides the outcome, which means the document is worth reading before signature rather than after a claim.

A start date you calculate, not one you pick

The Underground Utility Line Protection Law — the Act of Dec. 10, 1974, P.L. 852, No. 287 — protects, by its own title, underground lines used in providing electricity, communication, gas, propane, oil delivery, oil product delivery, sewage, water or other service. Communication is in the protected class, so both the conduit a crew places and the plant it is likely to encounter are inside the act.

Under section (2.1), as amended October 29, 2024 by Act 127, an excavator must submit a locate request through the One Call System, and notification “shall be not less than three nor more than ten business days in advance of beginning excavation or demolition work.” For a complex project, notification shall be not less than ten business days in advance.

Then the sentence that catches crews. “No work shall begin earlier than the lawful start date which shall be on or after the third business day after notification.” Two mechanics sit inside it. The date of notification itself is excluded from the count. And a notification received on a Saturday, Sunday or holiday is processed on the following business day.

Work through a Friday evening submission: it is processed Monday, and the third business day after that lands mid-week — appreciably later than a crew reading only “three business days” would put it. A schedule built around mobilization dates rather than ticket arithmetic will regularly place a crew on site before it is lawful to turn the drill, and that is a violation of the act rather than merely an early start.

Three excavator seats on the committee that hears it

Under section 7.8 a damage prevention committee is established, appointed by the Public Utility Commission. Its composition is set in the act rather than left to the regulator: the commission chairman or a designee from the commission’s professional staff; the Secretary of Transportation or a designee; the president of the One Call System or a designee; one representative from each of the nonmunicipally owned or affiliated facility owner industries — electric, natural gas or petroleum pipelines, telephone, water or wastewater, and cable television — nominated by facility owners; three representatives of excavators, nominated by excavators or affiliated organizations; and a representative of municipal governments.

Three excavator seats is a substantial proportion of a panel of that size, and the consequence is the same as in every state that uses a constituency committee rather than an agency: a contested matter is decided by people who have stood on job sites, and the material that persuades them is contemporaneous field documentation rather than argument.

Two thousand five hundred, or fifty thousand

Under section 7.10(a) the commission may issue a warning and an order requiring compliance with the act, and may levy an administrative penalty. A warning, order or penalty is served at the person’s last known address, and a party aggrieved may appeal under 2 Pa.C.S. Ch. 5 Subch. A (practice and procedure of Commonwealth agencies) and Ch. 7 Subch. A (judicial review of Commonwealth agency action).

The ceilings under section 7.10(b)(1) are tiered by consequence rather than by repetition — the figure that moves them is the harm done, not the number of prior violations. A person or entity violating the act may be subject to an administrative penalty of not more than $2,500 per violation — or, if the violation results in injury, death or property damage of $25,000 or more, an administrative penalty of not more than $50,000.

Be precise about what the twenty-five thousand figure is. It is not an amount you pay and it is not a measure of your liability. It is the threshold that moves the administrative ceiling up twentyfold. On a fiber route it is reached more readily than crews expect, because the cost of restoring a severed line and the service interruption behind it are not bounded by the size of the excavation that caused them.

Under section 7.10(b)(2) the commission and the committee consider the history of the party’s compliance with the act before the date of the violation, and the amount of injury or property damage caused. A documented compliance history is therefore an input to the number rather than mitigation offered afterwards.

Neither the certificate nor a statute

The contractors who reach us in Pennsylvania are usually mid-project, holding a certificate a prime has refused and an agent who cannot explain why re-issuing it will not help. Here the certificate is rarely the real problem, and neither is a statute. Because §491 does not reach a boring subcontract and Ruzzi makes the clause’s own wording decisive, the indemnity article is doing all the work — and because the lawful start date under Act 287 is calculated rather than chosen, the other common failure is a crew that mobilised lawfully by its own calendar and unlawfully by the act’s. Read the clause before signature, and count the start date from the ticket rather than the plan.

Pollution liability sits outside Act 287. The act governs damage to protected lines and the penalties that follow; drilling fluid surfacing into a creek, an abandoned mine working or a storm sewer is an environmental loss the general liability form excludes, and in a state with this much legacy subsurface the receiving void is not always on the plan. Contractors equipment matters because a complex-project classification moves notification to ten business days with the rig waiting. General liability is specified against the contract — and in Pennsylvania that specification, and the indemnity article beside it, are the documents that decide the outcome.

With no statute on the indemnity side, a Pennsylvania clause is read against a rule of construction and a calculated start date — one contract and one ticket. The account around them is on our Pennsylvania fiber contractor insurance page.

Why Fiber Optic Guard Insurance

What we actually do on a Pennsylvania file: read the indemnity article against Ruzzi rather than against a statute, because the question is whether the clause says clearly and unequivocally that it covers the other party’s own negligence; check whether the counterparty is a design professional, since §491 does operate there and the analysis changes; calculate the lawful start date from the ticket — excluding the notification date and treating a weekend or holiday submission as arriving the next business day — rather than from the three-day figure; watch for a complex-project designation, which moves notification to ten business days; and build the field record for a committee with three excavator seats, because that panel reads documentation. If a prime has sent you a broad indemnity clause, send it here before it is signed; in this state the drafting is the whole of it.

Frequently asked questions about Pennsylvania directional drilling insurance