Getting the two 1500 gallon rainwater cisterns to the site turned out to be a little bit of a hassle followed by several surprises that required creativity and a lot of patience to deal with.
We ordered liftgate service from the delivery company, which is a truck capable of lowering the tanks mechanically - the cistern tanks are large, heavy, and awkward. The tanks, it seems, are much larger than any lift-gate the company had -- but somewhat beside the point, since it turned out that any lift-gate truck wasn't available for a week, anyway. That meant we needed to have equipment on site to lift the 700 lbs tanks off what was supposed to be an open flatbed truck -- we'd just get our backhoe here to dig the holes the same days as the scheduled delivern, and then lift and handle the tanks with the same backhoe.
That morning, our backhoe arrived and we started digging. Our hole was squeezed tight between our gas line, which we hand dug around - the line sits on the south side of the hole; the city water and sewer lines bound the north side of the hole, along with the discovery of the house's old septic tank (still in surprisingly good condition).
The tanks themselves are 9 feet long, 7 feet tall, and require 2 feet of manhole access above that. They have to be buried sufficiently deep to provide adequate slope from the gutter downspouts halfway around the house to the tank inlet. If the tanks aren't deep enough those pipes wouldn't flow properly. So we now have a 10 foot deep hole in the front yard, which is much more impressive than it sounds when written down.