24/7 emergency — Plumbing · HVAC · Electrical · Restoration
Sewer and water service lines, buried gas and electrical, utility trenching, culverts, storm drains and French drains — dug, installed, inspected and put back.
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Why one company
Most excavation outfits dig and leave. The pipe, the conduit, the connection, the pressure test and the inspection are then somebody else’s work, on somebody else’s schedule, under a second permit — and when a line fails two years later the two companies each point at the other.
M&R holds the plumbing and electrical licenses and owns the machines. One crew locates it, digs it, installs it, gets it inspected, backfills it properly and puts the surface back — and one company is answerable for all of it.
What we dig
Each of these is a different problem with a different answer. The one thing they share is that getting it wrong is expensive to reach again.
Replacing a line that is past repair.
A camera goes down the line first, because the picture decides the job. A single offset joint or one crushed section is a spot repair and a short trench. A line that is bellied, collapsed, or has root intrusion through every joint gets replaced end to end. We locate the run and its depth before anything is dug, so the trench goes where the pipe is rather than where the plan says it should be.
Sewer line repair →From the meter to the house.
The service line is the one nobody thinks about until the pressure drops or a patch of lawn stays green through a dry spell. Galvanized lines corrode shut from the inside and old polybutylene splits at the fittings. The replacement goes in below the local frost depth, bedded in sand rather than laid on rock, with a new shutoff where it enters the building so the next repair does not need the street.
Repiping →Buried runs to a shop, generator, grill or pool heater.
A buried gas run is sized for the appliance at the end of it and every appliance already on the system, which is the step most often skipped — a line that is one size light works perfectly until the second appliance fires. Tracer wire goes in with the pipe so it can be found again, the line is pressure tested, and it is inspected before the trench closes.
Gas lines →Power out to a shop, barn, well, pump or gate.
Burial depth depends on what is in the trench — direct-burial cable, PVC conduit and a feeder behind a breaker are each held to a different minimum, and the inspector measures it. We pull the conduit, set the sweeps so the wire can actually be pulled later, keep the required separation from the gas and water in the same trench, and land it on a panel sized for what the building will eventually hold rather than what it holds today.
Wiring & repairs →One trench, several utilities, done to spec.
Running water, gas, electric and low-voltage in a shared trench is cheaper than four trenches and is allowed, within rules about vertical separation, bedding and marking. Each utility gets its own bed and its own warning tape at the right height, and the backfill goes in lifts and is compacted rather than pushed back in and left to settle over the winter.
Driveway crossings and washouts.
A culvert is sized for the water the ditch actually carries in a hard rain, not for the pipe that happened to be there. One that is undersized, crushed at the inlet, or silted full sends the next storm across the driveway instead of under it. We set the invert so it drains, armor the inlet and outlet so the ends do not undercut, and rebuild the shoulder over the top.
Moving surface water off the property.
Surface water is collected at catch basins and carried to somewhere it can go — daylight on a slope, a dry well, or a legal tie-in. The whole job is grade: a line with a flat spot in it holds water, freezes, and fails at the flat spot. We shoot the grade rather than eyeball it, and size the basins and the pipe to the roof and paving area feeding them.
Subsurface water, away from the foundation.
A perforated pipe in washed rock, wrapped in filter fabric, intercepting groundwater before it reaches a wall or a crawlspace. Fabric and clean rock are what decide whether it still works in ten years — a drain backfilled with native soil silts shut and becomes a buried pipe full of dirt. Where the water has nowhere to fall to, the trench feeds a sump instead.
French drains →How it goes
Six steps, in this order, every time. The two that get skipped by the cheapest quote are the locate and the compaction, and both of them are found out later.
San Juan County
After the flooding
A culvert that was undersized or silted before the storm is the reason the water went over the driveway instead of under it, and saturated ground has found every weak spot in the drainage around a lot of houses this month. That work is worth doing before the next one rather than after it.
Flood damage help →Before you book a dig
For most of this work, yes — sewer, water service, gas and electrical are permitted and inspected in both states, and the inspection happens while the trench is open. Locating is not optional at all: a free utility locate has to be requested before any digging, on any property, by anyone, and hitting an unmarked line you did not have located is the homeowner’s liability.
A camera inspection answers it and nothing else does. One offset joint, one crushed section or one root ball is a spot repair and a short trench. A line that is bellied along its length, or has roots coming in at every joint, is replaced — patching it repeatedly costs more than the replacement within a couple of years.
Yes. Frozen ground is slower and the spoil pile behaves differently, but emergencies do not wait for spring, and a failed water service or a sewer backup in January is an emergency. Surface restoration is sometimes the part that waits for the ground to thaw, and we will say so up front rather than after.
The trench line will be visible for a season — that is honest, and anybody who tells you otherwise is guessing. What we control is the part that matters: backfill compacted in lifts so it does not sink, topsoil back on top, and concrete, asphalt or pavers put back rather than patched with gravel.
Usually yes, and it is worth doing before the next storm rather than after. A culvert that was undersized or silted before the flood is the reason the water went over the driveway instead of under it, and replacing it is a different job from digging out the one that failed.
Yes — a shared trench is allowed and it is cheaper than digging twice, within rules about how far apart the utilities sit vertically, how each one is bedded, and where the warning tape goes. We do both trades, so one crew sets the whole trench to spec and one inspection covers it.
Sewer, water, gas, power or drainage — call (505) 325-9312 and we will come and look at it before anybody quotes a number.
