Long before utilities can trench water pipes or string cable they need to know where they're trenching or stringing -- exactly where. Surveyors have been taking care of knowing exactly where you are for millennia. Nowadays everybody knows you can get your latitude and longitude from your Garmin or Google Earth. Here's a site that can give it to you without moving anything heavier than your mouse: http://www.findlatitudeandlongitude.com/. Even so, the surveyors in your state don't usually use plain old latitude and longitude. Surveyors end up using the State Plane System, which focuses on a smaller area and so does a better job of transmitting spots from a globe onto the flat surface of a survey or map. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a site at which you can take your own latitude and longitude and translate it into your own state plane system coordinates, should you care to know them. Note: on this page, you'll have to express your location as a compass direction followed by degrees, minutes, and seconds (and then decimal portions, if you have ‘em) the way you do the date on a form: That is, for latitude, put E or W, followed by DDMMSS(.dddd, if you got ‘em); for longitude, put N or S, followed by DDDMMSS(.xxx, again; and note that longitude is three digits, so if like me you're at, say, 78 degrees west longitude, you've got to put 078, not 78). http://geodesy.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/spc_getpc.prl The National Geodetic Survey places benchmarks all over the continent -- the illustration on this page is the one nearest my house, named, some say, for the pro football team the person who set it liked best. If you want to find the USGS benchmarks near your house, a great way to find them is http://www.geocaching.com/mark/. All you have to do is drop in your zip code and you'll get a list of nearby benchmarks that you can troop over to look at. If you prefer to make things a little harder for yourself, you can enter your actual latitude and longitude on this NGS site http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/ds_radius.prl. You've probably seen markings like these on your street and wondered what they are. It turns out that whenever someone wants to dig a hole on public property, they reach out to a service that forwards the information on their project to utilities. Then every utility has people whose entire job is to go to the dig sites and spray paint directly on the streets lines indicating what's down there: the electric utility sprays a red line above buried wires; the water company puts blue over water mains; and so forth. The colors are the same wherever you are: now you know what they mean.