In Great Britain, there are approximately four million excavation projects taking place every year – 77,000 every week. During the course of these, on average there are 60,000 cases each year of a contractor striking a utility of one sort or another, often causing serious injury to the worker. Some utilities such as telecoms, for example, are not so likely to cause injury, but striking an electricity cable or gas pipe is quite the opposite. There are a dozen or so fatalities each year.

Of the four million a year excavations, as of 2020 some 2.6 million of them were searched on a site called Line Search Before U Dig – or LSBUD for short. So 62% of them were preceded by such a search. LSBUD is free to use and has been steadily growing as more and more utilities and local authorities have come on board. LSBUD states that there are 1.5 million kilometres of underground services in the UK, although other figures say as much as 2.5 million: it rather depends who you believe since nobody seems to know for sure. Nevertheless, as of 2020, LSBUD covered no fewer than 800,000 kilometres, and this figure is steadily increasing as more utilities and local authorities become members.

The LSBUD portal is free to use and is searched every 12 seconds. However, this still means that there are a lot of contracts being carried out without such a search. It is just common sense to carry out a search since it is free to do and is also quick. At the worst, there may be no information.

LSBUD reports some interesting figures, noting that the biggest threat in terms of excavation volume is major telecoms companies, with operators and their contractors carrying out some 881,000 searches in 2018, or 34% of the total. These were followed by water companies with 574,000 searches, and highways with 360,000.

Over the six years from 2014 to 2020, there were 3,972 injuries to workers, including fatalities, as a direct result of striking underground utilities. However, those figures are only the ones that have been reported to the HSE and do not include incidents that were either unreported or ignored.

On top of that, there is the cost factor involved, since assets that have been hit need to be repaired. However, that is by no means the beginning and end of it, as the indirect costs far outweigh the direct costs. There is the impact on the immediate neighbourhood, the ill-health of workers, disruption to traffic, loss of custom to local businesses, and so on. Indeed, LSBUD calculates that for every £1,000 cost of repairs, the true cost is £29,000 – 29 times the direct cost.

So it certainly makes a lot of sense to carry out a search before commencing any work.

However, while such a search may produce some useful results (or then again may not produce any) the last thing that you should do is to rely on those results. They should only ever be treated as a guide. This is because there has never been a unified system for reporting and recording information on underground assets. As a result, different authorities and utilities have their own ways of recording things. On top of that, there may well be information that is inaccurate, or there may be no information at all. There might be a situation where a utility has instructed a contractor to lay, say, a cable, at a depth of four feet, and the contractor has cut corners and laid it at a depth of two feet. It is impossible to know for certain.

This is why it is essential to carry out a survey on-site before conducting any excavation work. It is also essential for a surveyor to understand in depth the use of the CAT and Genny which are the main tools for the location of underground services, and in particular their limitations. At Sygma Solutions our cable avoidance training course deals with all of this in-depth. This is because it is not only necessary to understand how to use the CAT and Genny in all modes, but to be fully aware of the limitations, which are by no means always apparent.

So, the answer is to carry out a search first and then conduct a survey using all the necessary tools, before ever breaking ground.