Nothing broke. That's what makes this trade different.

General liability is the foundation, and on this trade it is doing something unusual, because the claims it meets are frequently not about defective work at all but about where water and earth ended up. Workers compensation covers employee injury, and the severity here is trench collapse and equipment rather than strains. Contractors equipment, written as inland marine, covers what is usually the largest equipment schedule of any trade in this book, from excavators and dozers to skid steers, trench boxes, lasers and lowboys. Commercial auto covers the trucks, and if you haul it covers a genuine road exposure rather than an incidental one. A commercial umbrella adds limits over liability and auto.

Two form questions deserve a specific conversation on this trade. How your liability form treats damage to property below the surface, since everything you do happens underground or to the ground. And how it treats collapse and earth movement, since loss of support to a neighboring structure is the classic severe claim here. Neither is something to discover during a claim.

Possibly, and this is the thing that makes this trade different from every other one we write. On most trades a claim is a defect claim, meaning something you built failed. Here the work usually did not fail at all. The grade you cut is the grade on the drawing, the elevations are right, and nothing broke. What happened is that the shape of the ground changed, and the shape of the ground decides where water goes for the next thirty years, so water now runs where the new elevations send it and that turns out to be onto somebody else's land. Because conformity to the plan is not in dispute, we built it to the plan is a weaker position here than it would be on any other trade. The argument moves off workmanship and onto whether what was done was reasonable in the circumstances.

Two practical consequences follow. Keep the plan, the source of it, who prepared it and who approved it, because if the design created the problem then the identity of the designer matters a great deal. And raise a drainage concern in writing before you move dirt rather than after, since a concern you raised and somebody else overruled is a very different position from one you noticed and said nothing about.

We are going to be straight with you about the limits of what we can tell you here, because this is an area where the sources we reviewed do not agree with each other. Different authorities characterize Arkansas surface water liability differently. One describes it as governed principally by a reasonable use standard. Another lists Arkansas among the states that apply a common enemy approach with a reasonableness requirement layered on top of it. A leading decision surveying the various doctrines notes that the Arkansas court has said a landowner fending off surface water must do no unnecessary harm to others. Those are not the same label and we are not going to pick one for you, because getting that wrong would be worse than saying less.

What they converge on is the part that actually matters to a contractor, which is that a reasonableness limit applies and no source suggests Arkansas allows a landowner to do whatever it likes with water. So expect the fight to be about whether what was done was reasonable and whether the harm caused was necessary, rather than about whether a rule was broken. That is a legal question that turns on facts we do not have, it is genuinely contested at the level of doctrine, and it belongs with an Arkansas attorney who practices in this area before it belongs with an insurance agency.

Maybe, and the reason people get caught out is that the threshold is not measured the way they assume it is. Arkansas construction stormwater discharges are covered under a general permit administered by the Division of Environmental Quality, and it reaches total land disturbance of one acre or more. Sites disturbing one acre or more but less than five acres are treated as small sites and are automatically covered, with an automatic notice of coverage and a small site pollution prevention plan required to be completed before construction begins rather than sent in to the Division. Sites disturbing five acres or more are large sites and require a notice of intent.

Here is the part that catches contractors. Coverage also reaches disturbance of less than one acre where the activity is part of a larger common plan of development or sale. In other words the threshold is not measured by your job, it is measured by the development your job belongs to, so a half acre pad inside a subdivision is inside the permit because the subdivision is. The permit also sets natural buffer requirements measured from the top of the bank to the disturbed area, being twenty five feet from waters of the State and fifty feet from certain listed and protected waters. Confirm what applies to a specific site with the Division rather than from any web page, including this one.

That is the severe claim on this trade and it is worth understanding why it behaves differently from ordinary property damage. When an excavation removes support from adjoining land, what follows can be settlement, cracking or movement in a structure that nobody was working on and that may not belong to your customer at all. The damage is often progressive rather than immediate, so it is discovered and argued over months, and the repair is structural rather than cosmetic, which is why severity here is high even on jobs that were not especially large.

On the coverage side there are two wordings worth raising specifically rather than generally. Forms written for excavating classes commonly address damage to property below the surface, and commonly address collapse, and the treatment varies considerably between forms. Ask how yours handles both, ask whether anything has been added or removed, and get the answer in writing before the season rather than during a claim. On the practical side, condition surveys of adjacent structures before you start are the same habit that carries the restoration trade and they work for the same reason. Once a crack is argued about, the only useful evidence is what the wall looked like before your machine arrived.

It is the exposure on this trade that hurts people rather than property, and it is the reason the workers compensation side of an excavation account is read as carefully as the liability side. A collapse happens quickly, it happens to whoever is in the trench, and the injuries are severe. There is no useful sense in which this is an insurance problem first. Protective systems, spoil placement, access and egress, competent person requirements and inspection are workplace safety obligations, they are governed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and by qualified safety professionals, and we are deliberately not publishing depth figures, sloping ratios or shoring specifications on this page because those are not ours to summarize and a number taken from a web page is exactly the wrong way to learn them. Take them to the Administration and to a competent person.

What we can tell you is how it shows up on your insurance. Your experience rating carries injury history for years, so a serious loss is expensive long after the claim closes. Underwriters read excavation depth, protective system practice and crew supervision as the risk itself rather than as a side question. And documented training and daily inspection practice is one of the few things that genuinely changes how an account is received.

The locate obligation and what follows a strike are covered in more detail on our underground boring page rather than repeated here, since that trade meets the question constantly and the treatment belongs in one place. The short version is that the request and the ticket are the record, the record is the defense, and the gap between where a line is marked and where it actually sits is where the arguments happen.

Two points are specific to open excavation rather than to boring. You are moving far more material and moving it faster, so a strike tends to involve a bigger machine and more force, which makes damage to the line more severe and makes the consequences of a service interruption larger. And you are frequently working across a whole site rather than along a single route, which means more crossings, more chances to encounter something unmarked, and more opportunity for a line located accurately at the start of a job to be somewhere unexpected by the time you reach that corner of the site weeks later. Document what you requested, what was marked and what you actually found, every time, and re locate when a job runs long. One more point worth making here. Directional boring is a separate operation from open excavation and it classifies separately, so a business that does both has two operations rather than one, and both need to be described on the policy rather than either being assumed to reach the other.

Both change the account and they change it in different directions, so they are worth separating. Hauling turns a site risk into a road risk. Dump trucks and lowboys on public roads bring weight, load security, other motorists and the condition of the roads you use into your exposure, and material tracked onto a public road from a site access is a genuine liability question rather than a housekeeping one. If hauling is a real part of what you do, your commercial auto is no longer the small part of the program and it should not be treated as such.

Blasting is a different matter again and it is materially different rather than merely larger. Where rock is involved, blasting is very frequently subcontracted to specialists, and when it is, what protects you is the quality of the contract and the evidence of the subcontractor's insurance rather than anything on your own policy. If you perform it yourself, expect a different market and different terms entirely. Two things to act on regardless. Confirm that hauling, and blasting if you do it, are inside your declared operations rather than assumed. And treat the regulatory requirements around blasting as questions for the relevant authorities, because we have not verified them and will not guess at them for you.

Not general liability, which is the most common and most expensive misunderstanding on every equipment heavy trade, and this trade carries more equipment value than any other in our contractor pages. General liability responds to damage you cause to other people and their property. Your excavators, dozers, loaders, skid steers, compactors, trench boxes, attachments, lasers, trailers and lowboys are your property, and they are covered under inland marine, usually written as contractors equipment or as tools and equipment.

Four things are worth checking rather than assuming. Whether scheduled values reflect what a machine would cost to replace today, since used equipment values have moved a great deal and stale schedules are the norm rather than the exception. How the policy treats machines left at remote sites overnight and at weekends, which on this trade is routine. Whether rented and borrowed equipment is addressed, because the rental agreement will make you responsible for a machine regardless of what your own policy says. And how equipment is treated while it is being transported, since a lowboy move is when a great deal of value is concentrated in one place and one moment.

Arkansas does not license excavation or grading as a trade in the way it licenses plumbing, electrical or heating and air work. What does apply is the separate question of your right to contract, and this trade meets it more readily than most because site work is frequently a large line on a large contract rather than a small standalone job. A contractor license from the Arkansas Contractors Licensing Board governs contracting for work above the statutory threshold, according to the size and nature of what you contract for rather than the trade you practice.

The consequence falls on the contract side and it is severe, because Arkansas contractor licensing law provides that no action may be brought at law or in equity to enforce a contract entered into in violation of that chapter. We are not publishing threshold figures because available sources disagree about them, so confirm what applies to the size of work you take with the Board directly. Separately from licensing, the environmental permitting side is real and it is administered by the Division of Environmental Quality under the Arkansas Water and Air Pollution Control Act and the federal Clean Water Act. Those are two different questions with two different authorities and neither one substitutes for the other.

Start the commercial quote form or call (479) 286-1066. This class rewards a detailed submission, because two businesses that both describe themselves as excavation contractors can be very different risks depending on what they take on.

Useful to have: your legal entity and years in business, an honest split between residential, commercial and any public or highway work, whether you do site development, subdivision work, pond and dam work, demolition or utility installation, your typical and maximum excavation depth, your protective system and competent person practice, whether you haul and with what, whether rock and blasting are involved and whether that is subcontracted, your locate and documentation practice, whether you carry out condition surveys of adjacent structures, how you handle stormwater compliance and who prepares the plans, your use of subcontracted labor, estimated annual payroll and revenue, employee count, a vehicle and trailer schedule with drivers, a full equipment schedule with values including anything routinely rented, the limits your contracts require, and loss runs for the last several years. If you have had a drainage complaint from a neighboring owner or a utility strike, raise both up front, because those are the two shapes this trade actually produces.