MISS DIG, 72 Hours, and the Caution Zone

Let us be clear about the scope of this article before anything else, because the honest version is narrower than the version most dumpster companies publish.

We are not telling you that Michigan’s dig-safe law applies to setting a container down. The statute governs excavation and blasting. Whether placing a roll-off, driving a truck across a lawn or setting outriggers triggers any obligation under it is not something we could establish from the act, and we are not going to infer it to make a page sound more important than it is.

What we can tell you is this. A great many containers in this area are rented for a job that does involve digging — a fence line, deck footings, a stump, a pool removal, a patio tear-out that goes down into the base, a foundation repair. That digging is yours to notify, there is a statutory clock on it, and the clock is written in hours rather than days. Michigan’s version of this law also uses vocabulary that differs from the national default on three separate points, which means a template written for another state gets the numbers and the words wrong at the same time.

So: the correct figures, with the sections they come from, and no padding.

The statute

Michigan’s dig-safe law is the MISS DIG Underground Facility Damage Prevention and Safety Act, 2013 PA 174, compiled at MCL 460.721 et seq. It is a 2013 act, not an old one, and it reads like a modern rewrite: the definitions are tight, the clocks are explicit, and the language is not the language used in most other states.

The notification system itself is reached on 811. You can also look at MISS DIG 811, which is the notification system’s own site. The act text sits with the Michigan Legislature. We read the act; we did not read the notification system’s own internal rules, and we flag that because a system can impose process requirements on its members beyond what the statute says.

At least 72 hours, and not more than 14 calendar days

This is the number a national page most reliably gets wrong, and it gets it wrong in a way that is easy to miss, because a rule of thumb expressed in days sounds close enough to seventy-two hours to pass unnoticed.

MCL 460.725(1) requires notice “at least 72 hours, but not more than 14 calendar days, before the start of any blasting or excavation.”

Three things follow from that sentence, and all three matter on a real schedule.

• It is hours, not days. Michigan does not express the notice period in days at all. If you have a day count written into a project plan, you have written another state’s law into your plan.
• It is a window with a ceiling, not just a floor. Not less than 72 hours and not more than 14 calendar days. You cannot call six weeks out and bank the ticket. Notify too early and you are outside the window just as surely as if you notified too late.
• Hours that fall on non-business days do not count toward the 72. So a Thursday-afternoon notice does not produce a Sunday-morning dig. The clock pauses when the business week does.

Which makes the definition of a business day a load-bearing part of the rule rather than a footnote.

“Business day,” and the hours inside it

Michigan does not use the phrase “working day” either. The statutory term is business day, and MCL 460.723(d) defines it as “Monday through Friday, excluding holidays observed by the notification system.”

Note whose holidays those are: the notification system’s. Not the federal calendar, not your calendar, not the calendar your general contractor keeps. If you are planning a dig around a holiday, the question to ask is which days the notification system observes.

Business hours are defined separately, at MCL 460.723(e): 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern.

Put the two definitions together with the 72-hour floor and the arithmetic is not intuitive. The window is counted in hours, but only hours inside Monday-to-Friday count, and the week excludes a holiday set defined by a third party. The practical consequence is simple enough: notify early in a week, not late in one, and if there is a holiday anywhere near your start date, add room.

The caution zone is 48 inches — and Michigan’s word for it is not the national one

Here is the second vocabulary correction, and it is the one that most reliably marks out a page written somewhere else.

Most states have their own name for the protected band either side of the locate marks, and Michigan does not use it. Michigan’s term, defined at MCL 460.723(f), is the caution zone, and it is the area within 48 inches of the facility marks, on either side. If you are reading a page about a Michigan job that calls it something else, that page was written for somewhere else.

Forty-eight inches is wider than people expect. Four feet either side of a marked line is an eight-foot corridor in which the rules change, and it is perfectly possible for two marked utilities a few feet apart to put an entire trench line inside a caution zone from end to end.

Inside the caution zone, you dig by hand — or by vacuum

MCL 460.725(5) requires that, before excavating in a caution zone, the excavator must “expose all marked facilities in the caution zone by soft excavation.” Power tools and equipment may be used in the caution zone only “after the facilities are exposed or the precise location of the facilities is established.”

So the sequence is expose first, machine second — not machine carefully and hope.

And soft excavation is defined, at MCL 460.723(bb). It includes:

• hand-digging
• cautious digging with nonmechanical tools
• vacuum excavation
• pneumatic hand tools

That is a useful list to have in writing, because it tells you that the obligation is not literally “shovels only.” Vacuum excavation is soft excavation. Pneumatic hand tools are soft excavation. A mini excavator is not.

If you are planning a job that puts a trench alongside a marked line for any distance, allow time for the hand work. It is the part of the schedule people underestimate, and it is the part the statute is least flexible about.

A ticket is good for 21 days, or 180 if you say so up front

Ticket life is set at MCL 460.725(3): “A ticket is valid for 21 days from the start date of the excavation or blasting on the ticket.”

There is an extension built in. A ticket lasts 180 days from the start date if the dig notice states that the work will not be finished within 21 days. Note the condition: it has to be stated in the notice. You do not get the 180 days by asking for it later; you get it by saying so when you file.

And when a ticket runs out, MCL 460.725(7) is explicit: “If a ticket expires before the commencement of excavation, an excavator shall provide a new dig notice.” The new notice has to meet the same timing rules as the first — at least 72 hours, not more than 14 calendar days.

This is the quiet trap on long residential projects. A homeowner notifies in April, the weather turns, the fence does not get built, and by the time the posts go in the ticket is a month stale. That is a new dig notice, with a fresh 72 hours in front of it.

White lining — required sometimes, not always

MCL 460.725(13) provides that “an excavator shall provide white lining in advance of submitting a ticket.” It is a conditional duty rather than a universal one, and it bites in two situations: where the site cannot be described well enough to identify the parcel, and on a facility owner’s reasonable request.

White is the excavator’s color in the marking scheme. MCL 460.727(2)(a) has white marks used by excavators to outline the proposed excavation or blasting area.

Where this is likely to come up locally is the address problem this whole site keeps running into. A rural parcel on a long frontage, a flag lot, a property with no clear street number, a large commercial site with several entrances — any of those can be hard to describe in a way that identifies the ground you intend to open. If you cannot describe it, paint it.

Where the container fits into all of this

Honestly: next to it, not inside it.

The duty under 2013 PA 174 belongs to the excavator, for the excavation. We rent the box the spoil and the debris go into. Those are two different things and we are not going to blur them to sound more regulated than we are.

What the law does do is set the shape of your schedule, and the container has to fit that shape:

• Notify before the box arrives, not after. Seventy-two business hours is often most of a week. A container sitting on a driveway while you wait for locates is a container you are paying for and not filling.
• Keep the box off the marks. Once the locates are down, they are paint and flags on the ground, and a truck setting a container across them erases the information you waited for. Tell us where the marks are and we will keep the wheels and rails clear of them.
• Expect the hand-dig to slow the fill rate. If a stretch of the job is soft excavation only, the spoil comes out at a walking pace, which changes how long you need the container rather than how big it needs to be.
• If the ticket expires, the dig pauses — the container does not have to. Say so when you call and we will work out whether it makes sense to pull the box and bring another back.

The jobs around here that usually involve digging

Worth running through, because people do not always think of their project as excavation:

• Fence replacement. Post holes are digging. A long fence line is a lot of holes, often along a property boundary, which is exactly where services tend to run.
• Deck and porch footings. Same issue, deeper.
• Stump removal. A grinder works the ground, and roots follow the easy path, which is often a trench someone else dug.
• Pool removal. The service lines to a pool have to come out or be capped, and the excavation itself is substantial.
• Driveway and patio tear-out that goes into the base. Breaking slab is not excavation; digging out the aggregate underneath it can be.
• Foundation and drainage work. Trenching alongside a house is the highest-consequence version of all of this.
• Shed and garage slabs, and anything with a new footing.

If any of that is your job, the dig notice comes first and the container comes second.

What we did not establish, said plainly

Three gaps, because they are yours to close rather than ours to paper over.

We did not establish whether any MISS DIG obligation attaches to container placement. The act governs excavation and blasting, and we did not read its definition of excavation in full. We will not infer an obligation and we will not deny one; ask the notification system.

We did not read the notification system’s own rules, as distinct from the statute — including which holidays it observes, which is the thing that moves the 72-hour clock. That is a question for the system.

And we are not going to tell you what the marks on your particular lot mean, or whether a private line on your own property is in the system at all. That is a conversation with the facility owners and the locator who comes out, not with a dumpster company reading a statute.

Who to call

• 811 — the notification system, statewide. Also missdig811.org.
• The statute — 2013 PA 174, MCL 460.721 et seq., at the Michigan Legislature.
• The curb and the road — which is a separate question from the dig, and in this market a road belongs to one of three authorities: the state, through MDOT, for state trunklines; the Saginaw County Road Commission, which reports 1,853 miles of road across 27 townships; or the city or village whose street it is. For a City of Saginaw street, start at (989) 399-1311.
• Us, for the box — (989) 272-9034. There is no quote form, no booking screen and no account. Tell us the job, the material and the date you expect locates to clear, and we will time the delivery to it.

Related reading: the permit question, driveway protection on Saginaw clay and which government am I in? Services that usually come with a dig attached: concrete and heavy debris, demolition debris, yard waste removal and construction dumpster rental. Sizes: the 10 yard is the usual answer for soil and base material, because dirt reaches lawful weight long before it fills anything larger.