Does General Liability Cover a Directional Drill Gas Line Strike?
Mostly no.

When your horizontal directional drill nicks a gas service line, the loss splits into two buckets. The first bucket is conventional third-party liability: physical damage to the pipe itself, damage to nearby property from the impact, bodily injury from the immediate event. A clean GL policy (no XCU exclusion) responds to this bucket. The second bucket is everything that flows from the gas escaping: emergency response, neighborhood evacuation, fire department standby, the utility's repair and purge costs, soil venting, and any injury or damage attributed to the released gas. That second bucket is a pollution event under the standard GL definition of 'pollutants' — and the total pollution exclusion removes it from coverage.

The utility pays for its own emergency response, then subrogates against the contractor — a bill that routinely runs $30,000–$150,000 for a service line and $100,000–$2M+ for a main. The contractor tenders the claim to their GL carrier expecting coverage and gets a denial letter citing the pollution exclusion. If there's no CPL policy behind the GL, the contractor pays out of pocket. This exact sequence is one of the most common ways small OSP contractors go out of business.

OSP fiber contractors doing any boring, trenching, or excavation need two things: a GL policy with no XCU exclusion and no underground utility damage exclusion (so the non-pollution bucket is covered), and a Contractor's Pollution Liability (CPL) policy for the pollution bucket. CPL for a fiber contractor typically runs $1,500–$8,000/year for $1M — trivial next to a single denied strike claim. Your 811 locate ticket documentation is the third leg: strikes with valid tickets and documented marks get paid; strikes without them get denied and subrogated.