Magic Numbers

摘要

Take a moment and flip back to read the title of this magazine. It's Underground Construction, and deals with - well, underground construction. Water, sewer, gas, telecom and electric; that pretty much covers all the bases. It also covers a lot of miles. According to the Common Ground Alliance, there are around 100 billion feet of underground utility lines buried in the United States. That equals around 19 million miles. Put in perspective, the distance from the earth to the moon is about 238,000 miles, and the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. If all of the buried utilities in the United States were laid end to end, it would take a beam of light over a minute and a half to go from one end to the other.