The effort to brings residential broadband fiber to Bowling Green has not been without incidents, as contractors working in rights of ways have cut utility and water lines and dug up lawns for days at a time.

Stupp Fiber, a startup company working on broadband fiber in the city, hires contractors to install fiber lines.

Stupp began installing fiber in Bowling Green in May 2023, and is expected to complete installation at the end of this year.

Beth Moyer, vice president of sales and marketing for Stupp, told the Daily News when Stupp contractors dig underground to lay fiber, conduit is buried to hold the fiber lines and utility lines are identified before any digging is done.

Kentucky 811 is a service individuals, contractors and companies call before digging. Under Kentucky’s “Call Before You Dig” law, calls must be made at least two full business days before work begins, according to Kentucky 811’s website.

After a call is placed, 811 will contact member utility companies, who find and mark underground utility lines.

“There have been instances where when we call, they’re not responding within the required timeline,” Moyer said. “There’s also been instances where the lines have not been marked properly and they may be as many as four feet off the markings.

“There have been instances where a line has been hit,” Moyer said. “But we are going through the proper channels and requesting the (locating) services as we’re legally required to do.”

Stupp is not the only fiber installer in Bowling Green. AT&T has been installing fiber in the city.

“We basically have two providers marching in that space,” Mark Iverson, general manager of BGMU, said.

Iverson said Stupp Fiber has an “aggressive schedule” and occasionally will accidentally strike a BGMU utility line when laying fiber.

“They’ve elected to go underground in most of their construction, (but) not entirely,” Iverson said.

He said tracer wire is placed around new utility lines during installation, which helps crews locate the lines more easily. The lines can deteriorate or get covered up by other utilities over time, however, increasing the difficulty of finding them.

“What sounds like what ought to be relatively easy to do is not necessarily quite as straightforward,” Iverson said. “That creates challenges and creates opportunities for things to get hit.”

Iverson said if a utility line is marked correctly and is damaged, the cost of repair materials and labor is billed to a contractor and not a utility company, since the company “is not directly doing the work.”

He said if an accident happens after hours, the labor rate may be higher since BGMU crews would be working overtime.

“The expense of the hit stays with them,” Iverson said. “We’re never going to be 100% right all the time, and so they probably have some budget in their own work associated with (repairs).”

He said repairs to lines happen “pretty quick.”

“We’ve got people on-call 24 hours a day,” he said. “It’s usually (repaired) within an hour or two.”