Your ticket tells you which facility owners were notified and what each one reported back. Knowing how to read it is the difference between waiting and guessing.
A locate ticket is not a single yes-or-no answer. It is a notification sent to every facility owner with registered facilities near your dig site, and each of them responds separately.
In 2024, Colorado 811 sent 7,746,883 outbound transmissions against 1,201,868 tickets — an average of 6.45 notified members per ticket. A typical metro dig involves half a dozen different organizations.
## What positive response tells you
Each notified facility owner reports a status: marked, clear (no facilities in the area), or unable to complete. Positive response is how you find out which.
The critical implication: **your dig area is not ready when the three days elapse. It is ready when every notified member has responded.** A ticket with five clears and one silent member is not a ticket you can dig on.
## Common statuses
**Marked** — facilities located and marked in the field.
**No facilities / clear** — that member has nothing in your dig area.
**Unable to complete** — the locator could not finish, commonly because access was blocked, the site description didn't match what they found, or the dig area wasn't identifiable. This one needs your action, not your patience.
## When the marks and the ticket disagree
If you see marks in a color that doesn't correspond to any member on your ticket, or you find evidence of a facility nobody claimed, stop and sort it out before excavating. Unregistered and abandoned facilities exist, and abandoned lines can be indistinguishable from live ones from the trench.
## Keep the records
Ticket number, response statuses, and photographs of the marks before you break ground. If a damage occurs and there is a dispute about whether the area was marked, contemporaneous photographs settle in minutes what would otherwise take months.
- 811
- positive response
- tickets