When undertaking any sort of contract that involves digging into the ground, there are, quite literally, hidden dangers. All types of services run underground – electricity, gas, water, sewers, telecoms, fibre optic, you name it – and they can be there exactly where you need to dig.

In some cases, in fact, in many cases, it is pretty obvious that underground services will be present. If you are working in the high street, then all those shops and offices will have utilities running into them. However, you might think that if your contract is to start building housing on a field out in the middle of the countryside, and that field used to contain sheep or cattle, then there is going to be nothing there. And you might be right. But suppose that field is the shortest distance between two villages and the electricity company used it for that precise reason? Underground services can be absolutely anywhere.

The fact is that before you put a spade into the ground, you need to take every precaution to ascertain if there are any services there, what type of services they are, and, as far as possible, how deep underground they are. Fortunately, today we have some fairly sophisticated tools that can help with locating underground services, but unfortunately, it is not just a case of taking them out of the box and reading the instructions. If it were that easy there wouldn’t be some 60,000 cable strikes every year!

Yes. That is the figure. Around 60,000 cable strikes every year. Some of them cause serious life-changing injuries. A few every year are fatal. Even if they don’t actually cause any injury, they are nonetheless a pain, because at the very least they can affect businesses or residences whose service suddenly gets cut off, and if you are the contractor you may have men waiting around doing nothing while the utility company comes along and repairs the mess you have just made. It may also mean a delay to a contract which can result in penalties from the end client.

In addition, if someone is seriously injured and perhaps is unable to work ever again, the court is going to award some pretty hefty damages, and if it is deemed that the injury was caused by your negligence as the contractor, your insurance company will doubtless refuse to pay. Businesses have been known to close down as the direct result of a cable strike.

But at least we have the CAT and Genny to come to our rescue. These two clever tools can help considerably with the location and identification of underground services, but as we said, you need more than just reading the instructions. This is the precise reason that, at Sygma Solutions, we provide a utility avoidance training course that covers every aspect of the use of the CAT and Genny for the underground service location. In fact, we provide a range of courses that cover different types of tool and training to all the various standards that are available. Between us, we have over 100 years’ experience of cable avoidance, and our courses are approved by The Survey Association, EUSR, CSCS, and so on, and lead to the award of the required cards. For example, in the case of HS2 you are not even allowed on the site without the appropriate card.

Proper training in the use of the CAT and Genny is critical because even they have their limitations, and in order to carry out a survey correctly and – hopefully – get a completely accurate picture, you need to know and understand what those limitations are.

For instance, one rather obvious limitation is the depth of underground service. Someone who is inexperienced might use the CAT and Genny and the result showed that there was nothing there. So you start digging cheerfully away and hit a gas main.

This could be because the reading could only go to a depth of, say, four feet and you needed to dig down five feet! There is a simple answer. You dig down carefully for about a foot and then – you take another reading! This time it will show the gas main at a depth of four feet six inches.

These are the sorts of things that you need to know, and which are covered in our courses.