In any building contract that involves construction work, that work will always begin with the foundations, and that means digging holes in the ground. There are many other reasons to carry out excavation work, largely to install, repair, or renew underground services, and there are quite a number of them.

We all need electricity, water, and sewage, and most of us could not live without telecoms and broadband either. Many homes also use gas for heating and cooking, so there will be plastic gas pipes in those areas as well.

Of course, in residential areas, there will always be service pipes and cables running underground, as there will in other built-up areas such as the high street or the local industrial estate. But they can also exist in areas that you wouldn’t expect to find them such as in the middle of a field or running across a large park-like Hyde Park in London. The fact is that they can, indeed, be anywhere at all, and until you make enquiries and undertake research you simply cannot know. What you should do, however, is to assume that they are in the area that you need to dig unless the opposite has been proven.

What you need to do before any excavation is to carry out enquiries and undertake a thorough survey of the area using the appropriate tools, in this case, the CAT and Genny. Obviously, the first thing to do is to obtain any plans that you can from the utilities that supply the area. However, you also need to understand that these plans may well be inaccurate, and in some instances, there may be no plans available anyway.

What also complicates things is that plans can be unreliable because they may originally have been drawings that have then become microfiches, and then computer records and errors may have crept in during the changes. In addition, changes to nearby roads or buildings can also make changes. There are cases where old gas pipes have had new ones added underneath or alongside them and the old pipelines are still recorded while the new ones have not been added.

When plans are available, they can only ever be used as a guide because there can be many reasons why they may not be correct. Not only that but there is no national system of recording underground services, so the way that they are kept by one utility may vary considerably from another.

One service that is useful is LSBUD – Line Search Before U Dig – which is an online portal that more and more local authorities and utility owners are joining, and which now claims to cover over half the total of underground services in the UK. The portal receives one search every 12 seconds, so it is as good a place to start as any. However, you still cannot rely on it 100%.

According to PAS128, which is all about underground utility detection, the location of services should be kept entirely separate from excavation, which means that after checking plans the site must be surveyed using a cable avoidance tool (CAT) and signal generator (Genny) to detect the buried services and verify the plans. Or probably, more often, not verify them.

Of course, in order to thoroughly understand the use of the CAT and Genny in all their modes, you need to undertake a proper training course like the ones that we provide at Sygma Solutions. If you are searching for something like “CAT training courses near me” then you are in the right place because we are near you wherever you may be. If that sounds a little strange, then hear us out.

We provide training in the use of the CAT and Genny both in class and practically out on site. Our classroom sessions are available physically either at your own premises or here at ours in Wigan, but they are also available online, live, with an instructor and an interactive webinar platform. So, we are “near you” wherever you are.

Practical sessions on-site will then help operatives to fully understand all of the different functions of the CAT and Genny and give them the ability to survey a site in the confidence that they will be able to accurately locate services that are present.