Excavators in Texas have struck underground pipelines more than 4,800 times since the start of 2026, frequently causing explosive gas leaks, according to a KERA analysis of Railroad Commission of Texas incident data. More than 1,000 of those strikes happened in the Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, and Denton county area. On May 28, an apartment explosion in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas killed three people, and initial reports point to a boring rig that damaged a natural gas line. Excavation damage is one of the leading causes of harm to buried infrastructure, and the question for pipeline operators is whether they learn about a dig when it starts or when the line fails.
What Actually Happened
Texas law, often called the “call before you dig” rule, requires excavators to notify the state’s one-call center (811) at least 48 hours before digging so utilities can be marked. The Railroad Commission data tells two stories. About a third of the excavators who struck pipelines in 2026 had not called in before breaking ground. In the four-county Dallas-Fort Worth area, 177 of the strikes involved crews that never notified the state. The second story is harder: even crews that followed the law still hit lines. A recent McKinney strike damaged a marked, potholed polyethylene line. Locating older or non-metallic pipe is difficult when records are thin or wrong.
The Detection Gap
One-call marking and contractor education reduce strikes, and they matter. But a marked line is not a monitored line. Marking tells a crew where a pipe should be. It does not tell the operator when a backhoe is biting into the ground above it. Cameras and patrols verify damage and document a scene after the fact, and they are useful for that, but no camera can watch hundreds of miles of buried right-of-way, and most strikes happen in seconds far from any lens. The missing layer is real-time detection of the digging itself, along the length of the line.
How RaySense TPI and Digging Detection Addresses This
Distributed fiber-optic sensing turns the pipeline route into a continuous listening line. RaySense TPI and digging detection reads the vibration in the ground and recognizes the acoustic signature of an excavator, auger, or manual digging working near the pipe, then locates the activity to a span along the route in real time. That third-party interference alert reaches the operator while a crew is still digging, with time to call the site and stop work before contact. For station approaches, river crossings, and buried trunk runs, buried fiber-optic detection extends the same below-grade awareness across the wider site. Both fit into a broader pipeline protection program.
What Pipeline Operators Should Ask
A few questions separate paperwork from protection. How much of our right-of-way has any detection at all, versus relying on third parties to call 811? If a dig starts over a buried line tonight, would we know before or after a strike? Can we locate an event to a span so a responder is not searching miles of corridor? When an alert fires, can we tie it to camera verification so the control room sees what triggered it? The answers usually reveal long stretches that are marked on paper but unwatched in practice.
The Bottom Line
From 2005 through 2016, excavation damage caused 875 major pipeline incidents in the United States, resulting in 40 deaths, 166 hospitalizations, and more than $322 million in property damage, according to figures cited by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Marking programs and one-call rules reduce those numbers, but they cannot detect a strike in progress. Cameras verify; sensing along the line detects. Pairing distributed fiber detection with cameras gives an operator both the alert and the picture, so a dig near the line becomes a phone call rather than an explosion.
