This former PG&E engineer is building a ‘Google Maps for the underground’
Josh Mackanic left a 10-year engineering career at Pacific Gas and Electric because he kept thinking about what the utility company doesn’t know about what’s buried underground. “I had a job that got shut down because a pipe was in the excavation [that] we didn’t know about.
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Key Facts
- Fact 1: Josh Mackanic left a 10-year engineering career at Pacific Gas and Electric because he kept thinking about what the utility company doesn’t know about what’s buried underground.
- Fact 2: What’s in it?’” Mackanic eventually got the answer, but it took three days, a delay that cost $60,000.
- Fact 3: This leads to around 200,000 so-called “utility strikes” every year.
- Fact 4: So in 2020, Mackanic founded a startup called CivilGrid designed to solve this problem.
Josh Mackanic left a 10-year engineering career at Pacific Gas and Electric because he kept thinking about what the utility company doesn’t know about what’s buried underground. “I had a job that got shut down because a pipe was in the excavation [that] we didn’t know about.
Fortunately, we saw it before we impacted it,” he told TechCrunch. “But then there was this three-day ordeal of running around [asking] like: ‘Whose pipe is this? Can we tap it?
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