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Recent Articles By Rich Maxwell
HDD Survey Doing It Right
The Current HDD Recession
HDD: Drilling in Sand
Back Reaming
Third-party Damage Prevention Initiatives and HDD
Rich Maxwell is a regular contributor to The Driller.
Flow Mole (now knows as UTYLX) become a contractor, manufactured their own fleet of drills and quickly spread throughout the US and now the world with HDD contracts in the electric utility markets.
Have I mentioned yet that contractors are ingenious and resourceful You can guess what happened next.
At least three contractors I know of began to watch this phenomenal method of non-intrusively installing cable and pipe and began to build their own version. Once the opportunity was discovered,
commercialization began most notably at the 1988 ICUEE show in Louisville, KY when Ditch Witch and
StraightLine surprised the industry with new directional drills, brightly painted, ready for sale. Other first players in the small rig class were Underground Technologies and American Augers who also custom build
Cherrington-type big rigs.
Time won't permit discussing what happened next except to say when the bell companies finally accepted the technology and when the long-haul telecommunications boom hit, HDD became the accepted method for installing cable and pipe worldwide.
Today there are at least a dozen manufacturers of HDD rigs from inch to inch drill rod. Some experts estimate there are now over 10,000 drills on the North American continent. So what will the next 20 years bring?
I see three major areas where the HDD industry will mature and evolve in the next 20 years.
You will see a standardization of operator skill levels. Nonprofit organizations will offer classes and certification levels for beginners, advanced and special topic drilling practices. The equipment will become mechanically automated, electronically monitored and documented and more standardized as tooling and locating equipment becomes interchangeable. What a mouthful Drilling will become high-tech. Emerging technologies will provide as-built monitoring of where the rig is (GPS & wireless, where the head is (GPR & electromagnetic) and what other infrastructure is in the vicinity (GPR & acoustic. I don't mean to end on a negative note, but think about it, while you are reading this article there are to 8,000 drills punching a hole in the ground somewhere. Millions of feet are being installed everyday, underground, invisibly without disruption to streets, rivers and landscape. But what about tomorrow Where do we go The utility corridors are full.
Every city and county in America is discussing right-of-way (ROW) permitting. Most major highways across our country have three to six fiber-builds going down both sides of their ROW. Where do we go next This will be the biggest challenge to the contractor, who always seems to get stuck with the liability.
My belief is that just as the California contractors 20 years ago figured out away to solve their problems,
which changed the utility and pipeline construction world, so today conscientious contractors will find away to safely install new cable and pipe.

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