Diggers Hotline Celebrates 50th Anniversary

Celebrating 50 Years of Safety

This year marks a major year marks a major milestone for Diggers Hotline—50 years of serving as a critical safeguard for communities, contractors, and buried facility owners in Wisconsin. Since its founding in 1976, Diggers Hotline has played a central role in preventing damage to underground infrastructure, protecting lives, and supporting safe excavation practices across the region.

A Legacy of Safety and Service
Since our founding, our mission has been to prevent damage to underground utilities. Over the past five decades, we’ve helped millions of homeowners and professional excavators learn the location of buried utility lines. Each ticket processed represents a potential accident avoided, a service disruption prevented, and a community kept safe.

From Phone Calls to Digital Transformation
In our early years, requests were handled manually— paper records maps and manual processes. Today, we are a sophisticated, technology-enabled communication hub. What began as a way to notify utility owners before digging has grown into a vital part of damage prevention in the state. The impact is measurable not just in numbers, but in the countless incidents that never happened because someone chose to contact Diggers Hotline before digging.

Partnerships That Make It Work

At the heart of Diggers Hotline’s success is collaboration. Diggers Hotline is a non-profit organization that connects Wisconsin excavators and buried facility owners. This shared responsibility model has been essential in building trust and maintaining high compliance with safe digging laws.

Education has also been a cornerstone of this effort. Through outreach, training, and public awareness campaigns, Diggers Hotline has helped instill a culture where safe digging means filing a locate request and waiting three business days before starting excavation.

Looking Ahead: The Next 50 Years
As infrastructure grows more complex and demands increase, our role becomes even more critical. We are committed to continuing innovation, strengthening partnerships, and enhancing public awareness. Our focus remains on improving safety outcomes, supporting compliance, and delivering reliable service to every customer.

A Milestone Worth Celebrating

This 50th anniversary is not just a celebration of our history—it’s a celebration of everyone who has contributed to our mission. Together, we’ve built a safer environment for our communities, and together, we will continue that work for generations to come.

Before you dig, remember: contact Diggers Hotline. It’s simple, it’s free, and it protects what matters most.

Different Looks Through the Years