For the next month, a Florida firm will be sucking up Wyoming ground from under the 16th Street in downtown Cheyenne and causing minor traffic disruptions while it does. The project began Tuesday.

Tampa Bay Engineering will use "air lances" and vacuum tubes to dig as many as 250 holes into the earth below the street to precisely locate gas, electric, water and telephone utilities between Capitol Avenue and the Crow Creek bridge. Locations are being verified so the Wyoming Department of Transportation can proceed safely with its planned widening of 16th Street, which is slated to begin in earnest after Cheyenne Frontier Days.

Verification is needed because few typical utility landmarks, such as junction boxes and meters, exist in the area. Neither do sufficient, reliable plans from previous projects.

Minor traffic disruptions, usually amounting to temporary closure of one lane of traffic for a short distance will be necessary at times. They will occur in the immediate area of the vacuum-equipped trucks and will be handled by flaggers and traffic cones.

The first project section will be between the Dey and Snyder avenues.

The technology, termed "Subsurface Utility Engineering (SUE), is relatively new and, in this instance will be subsidized through a federal grant meant to increase familiarity with the process. WYDOT is one of three recipients of currently available grants. Here the grant will cover $100,000 of the $175,000 project cost.

FIrst, approximate locations of utilities are determined using previous project plans, landmarks and sensing devices that us radio-wave or similar technologies. Next a jackhammer is used to break a hole through the highway surface above an estimated location.

Then, with the SUE process, one worker begins to loosen the earth underneath and starts a hole with an "air lance," a long, narrow tube that shoots a continuous knife of air at the ground with a pressure of 150 pounds per square inch. At the same time, a second crew member sucks up the loosened earth with a 6-inch diameter vacuum tube.

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Wyoming Tribune-Eagle
April 24, 1997.