When digging in Chicago is reported to have struck a buried utility line, the report lands in the state’s 811 system — and the city’s file holds 14,508 such hit reports since 2015. Gas is what gets hit most: 4,882 reports mention a struck gas service line and 923 a gas main, and facilities owned by Peoples Gas — as the file spells it — appear in 6,216 reports, 43 percent of them all. City-owned facilities appear in 4,964, about a third. And 846 reports record striking something the file itself labels UNKNOWN. One counting note before anything else: the file holds 62,897 rows, but they are ticket notices — initial, update, cancellation — describing those 14,508 reports, and every figure on this page counts reports, never notices.
811 Chicago Utility Hit Tickets, Chicago data portal · 62,897 rows describing 14,508 hit reports, May 2015 through August 2026 · retrieved August 20, 2026One hit, many notices
The file logs a row every time a hit report gets a notice: 38,522 initial-ticket rows, 22,021 update rows, and 2,354 cancellation rows, and a report that names several struck facilities carries rows for each. Collapsed to distinct report numbers, the ledger holds 14,508 hit reports, two of them undated. Of those, 1,799 appear withdrawn in the file — counted here under a deliberately conservative rule: only reports whose every row carries Canceled or Duplicate status. A report is a report to the 811 system; the file records no damage measure, outage, or fault finding, and neither does this page.
The year arc
- 2015(the file’s partial first year)256
- 2018(the peak)1,876
- 20201,065
- 20231,135
- 20251,205
- 2026(through mid-August)814
Dated by each report’s earliest notice, the ledger runs from 256 reports in its partial 2015 opening to a 2018 peak of 1,876, then settles between roughly 1,000 and 1,500 a year — 1,205 in 2025, and 814 so far in 2026 through the mid-August retrieval.
What gets hit
- Gas service line4,882 reports
- Water service line2,055
- Gas main923
- UNKNOWN(the file’s own label)846
- Street lighting668
Facility counts overlap by design — a report that struck both a gas service line and a communication line counts once for each — so the table reads “reports mentioning,” not a partition. Gas dominates the top of it, water service follows, and the fourth-most-mentioned facility label in Chicago’s own ledger is UNKNOWN: 846 reports where what was reportedly hit is recorded as exactly that.
Whose facilities
Counted by the owners the file names — printed as the file spells them, asterisks and all — facilities owned by “Peoples Gas*” appear in 6,216 of the 14,508 reports, 43 percent, consistent with gas lines leading the struck-facility table. “City of Chicago (CoC)” facilities appear in 4,964 reports — about a third — with “AT&T (SBC IL)*” (505), “ComED North*” (253), and CDOT’s electrical-operations division (212) well behind. These are the owners of what was struck, as recorded; the file also names who was digging, and this page reads none of those columns, by choice.
Known limits
This is the reporting system’s own ledger, at the grain it keeps: a hit report is an entry in the 811 system, not a verified strike, a damage assessment, or an outage record, and the withdrawn count uses the conservative all-rows rule stated above. The file names the contractors involved; this page never reads those columns. No coordinates exist in the file, so nothing here is mapped. How many digs happen without a hit — the denominator that would turn these counts into a rate — lives in a separate dig-ticket system this page does not read, so no rate is computed. The file updates on the city’s schedule; every figure is a snapshot of the August 20, 2026 retrieval.
- Source 811 Chicago Utility Hit Tickets (nphj-5zur, Chicago data portal), 62,897 rows retrieved August 20, 2026.
- Counting Every figure counts distinct hit-report numbers (14,508), never rows; the row inflation (initial, update, and cancellation notices, multiplied by facilities named) is disclosed above. Reports are dated by their earliest notice; two undated reports are excluded from year figures. A report counts as withdrawn only when all of its rows carry Canceled or Duplicate status. Facility and owner figures count reports mentioning each value, so they overlap; owner names are folded case-insensitively and printed as the file spells them. Percentages are computed from raw counts.
Computed by KCM Desk from records retrieved August 20, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.