Wait a minute.. YOUR techs were following those same rules the in house and fulfillment guys did? The "must get locate before installing pole mount and burying cable"? THat's ridiculous....
In most properties, it is pretty easy to avoid buried utilities.
All one has to do is look to the dmark, telco interface and cable( if applicable) and then draw a reasonably straight line to the pedestals. Power and gas are buried pretty deep and of little danger of getting hit.
Now for front easement utilities, it may get a little dicey but if one is not sure, they should just make the effort to look for a more suitable placement.
I used to be a locator. On old guy showed me a neat trick to locate utilities by using a couple of those marker flags.