What is the most dangerous part of constructing a new building? Is it the height? Is it the design? Is it the floor? Is it the roofing system? Is it the electrics? Anything else?

Well, all of those things are vitally important, of course. And a lot more besides. But we believe that the most dangerous part of constructing a building starts right at the bottom. That is not on the earth surface itself, but below the surface.

Every single building everywhere has to begin with a foundation, and that foundation means that, in order to construct it, you have to dig. You can’t just come along and put a building on top of the ground.

Well, not strictly true. If you count a garden shed as a building, then you can do that. Even then you would be best advised to put at least a single layer of bricks into the soil surface. But for something solid and heavy you need a foundation.

This is where the problem lies. As soon as you start to dig, you risk coming into contact with all sorts of underground services – gas, electric, water, sewage, telecoms, and more – and they all run underground. Well, nearly all. We still have telephones and internet-connected via telegraph poles, but by and large services run underground in order to keep them out of sight and out of the way. You wouldn’t want sewer pipes running down the pavement on your local high street: they are underneath it.

So when you are digging foundations you need to avoid hitting underground services or avoiding a “cable strike” as it is known. This would seem to refer to electric cables and telephone cables, and it does. However, the term also includes all of the other underground services as well.

So cable avoidance when digging and excavating is critical. Strike an electricity cable and it is likely to cause serious injury and can be fatal. The same applies to gas pipes. You can cause an explosion which demolishes whole buildings – and before you think we are being over-dramatic, it has happened more often than you might imagine. It is estimated that there are some 60,000 cable strikes a year in the UK, many causing serious injury and around a dozen fatalities.

Now here is the crunch. How do you know if there are underground services running underneath where you need to dig?

Well, the answer is that you don’t. They can be literally anywhere. We all use electricity – unless you happen to live in a remote Scottish Island – we all have toilets and need sewers, we all have taps and need water, almost everyone has a phone line and internet. And so it goes on.

Now if you are going to excavate in your local high street, it is pretty obvious that all these services will be there. But are they running under the pavement or under the road? Exactly where are they? If you need to dig up the pavement because, say, you are working for the waterboard and need to make a repair, where are the electricity cables and gas pipes? Under the road or under the pavement?

Furthermore, if you are doing the same thing out in the sticks with nothing but sheep and cattle around you, and perhaps a wind farm, you may think there is nothing there.

But hang on. If there is a wind farm, it is creating electricity and those cables have to run somewhere. But where?

Fortunately, we have some great tools which can help to locate and identify underground services in order to help avoid cable strikes, and they are vital for the avoidance of underground services.

However, if you think that you can just take them out of the box and read the instructions, think again. These tools, clever as they are, do have certain limitations.

This is precisely why you need to attend one of the cable-avoidance courses that we provide at Sygma Solutions. We teach not just how to use the CAT and Genny in all their different modes, but how to understand what they can and can’t do, and what to do when they may say that the area is clear, but it actually is not.

This is critical learning that everyone involved in avoiding cable strikes needs. It saves lives.