Houston Why the Locate Flags Stopped at the Meter
Call before you dig, and Texas 811 sends someone out to paint and flag the utility lines that feed your house — the gas line, the electric service, the water main up to your meter. What that locate does not cover is anything on your side of the meter, and that includes every inch of your irrigation system: the mainline, the lateral pipe running to each zone, the low-voltage wire connecting the controller to the valves, and any landscape lighting wire buried alongside it. Those are private facilities, and in a market with as much backyard pool construction as Houston, that gap causes damage constantly. The crew digging your pool shell, decking, and plumbing trenches has no flags to tell them a sprinkler lateral sits eight inches down exactly where the excavator needs to go.
Four Ways a Pool Build Actually Damages a Sprinkler System
Not every pool job causes every kind of damage, but these four show up often enough locally to be worth naming individually rather than lumping together as "construction damage":
- Cut laterals. The pipe feeding one or more zones gets sliced by an excavator bucket or a hand trench for plumbing and gets capped, ignored, or simply left open underground.
- Severed zone wire. The low-voltage wire bundle running from the controller to the valve boxes is thin, often unmarked, and easy to miss until a zone stops firing and nobody can say why.
- Valve boxes poured over. If nobody flags the box locations before the deck forms go in, the boxes end up under several inches of concrete — recoverable only by cutting the slab.
- The lawn the zones were designed for no longer exists. A pool and deck can eat a third of the yard a zone used to cover, leaving heads watering deck furniture, a fence, or nothing at all.
The first two are usually a straightforward repair once located — see what a break in the buried pipe or a dead zone from one zone that won't turn on typically involves. A buried valve box is a different scale of problem, closer to the kind of mess covered under water coming up out of the valve box — except here the box isn't geysering, it's inaccessible.
Two Decisions Before the Concrete Truck Shows Up
Both of these cost nothing if they happen before the pour and cost real money to fix afterward:
- Keep valve boxes and the backflow assembly outside the deck outline. Walk the planned deck and coping line with the pool contractor before forms go in and confirm, visually, that no valve box sits under where concrete will land. If one does, move it now — cutting a slab later to reach a valve is a far bigger job than relocating a box before the pour.
- Lay a sleeve under the deck wherever pipe or wire has to cross it. A sleeve is a length of larger pipe set under the slab before pouring, through which mainline, laterals, or wire can run or be pulled later without cutting concrete. Skipping this step is fine until the day a line under the deck fails and there's no way to reach it short of demolition.
Both of these are conversations to have with the pool builder directly, during the layout walk, not after the deck has cured.
Read the Contract Before You Sign, Not After
Most pool contracts in this market carry an exclusion clause for underground irrigation — language stating the builder is not responsible for damage to sprinkler lines, valves, or wiring encountered during excavation. That clause is common enough to be unremarkable, but it means the burden sits with the homeowner to flag existing irrigation locations before work starts and to document the system's condition beforehand. A phone photo of each valve box location and a quick zone-by-zone run-through before the crew arrives is cheap insurance against an argument over who broke what.
After the Deck Is In
Once the pour is done, run every zone and watch it rather than trusting that silence means everything survived. A zone that used to water a stretch of lawn now gone needs its heads capped or its coverage redesigned, not left running onto concrete. A full walk-through — checking every zone, head, and valve against what the yard looks like now — is exactly the kind of work covered in a whole-system audit, and it's worth doing any time a major yard project changes the ground the system was built for, not just in spring.
The takeaway: Texas 811 protects the utility's pipes, not yours, so the irrigation system has to be located, photographed, and planned around before a pool crew ever breaks ground.