Accidentally striking any type of services running underground when carrying out any sort of excavation work can have a massive impact on the person doing the digging and those working with him, and it can also have a serious effect on the owner of the asset that is damaged.

As an absolute minimum, work on the project has to be suspended until the asset owner can send out a team to repair the damage, but there can be far more serious repercussions. Not the least of these are injuries to workers, which in many cases are life-changing, and are on occasion fatal.

Richard Broome is Managing Director of LSBUD (Line Search Before U Dig) and writing on the localgov.co.uk website in January gave some interesting figures. There are 4 million excavation projects of one sort or another taking place in the UK every year, and of those, a record 2.6 million were searched for on the LSBUD portal (which is free to use) last year. Part of this increase was due to the fact that more local authorities and utility suppliers are now members of LSBUD, so of the 1.5 million kilometres of underground services that exist, some 800,000 kilometres is today recorded on the LSBUD portal.

The portal receives a search every 12 seconds, but Broome says that it is worrying that nearly four out of every ten projects are still proceeding without proper searches. That means that a spade or digger is striking the ground every 21 seconds without a proper search having been undertaken. This results in some 60,000 cable strikes every year.

The biggest sector undertaking searches was telecoms. Major operators and their contractors carried out 881,000 searches in 2018, making up 34% of the total. This was no doubt increased by the government’s drive to produce better broadband.

The second-largest number of searches, 574,000, was by water companies, while highways carried out 360,000 searches.

Over the last six years, there have been 3,972 injuries, including fatalities, caused by striking underground services, and this is only the number actually reported to the HSE. It doesn’t include incidents that were ignored or unreported.

Of course, any utility that is hit and needs to be repaired not only costs money to do, but it also takes time. Broome says that there are indirect costs such as ill-health of workers, traffic disruption, loss of custom to local businesses, and the impact on the local neighbourhood, in addition to the cost of repairs. There may also be penalties levied on the contractors together with the cost of paying worker standing idle. In addition, there can be serious damage to the reputation of the contractors concerned because any disruption affects consumer perception, and now that we have social media, any complaint can very quickly spread to a large audience. Broome says that for every £1,000 cost of a repair to a utility strike, the true cost is £29,000.

However, simply carrying out a search on LSBUD is not nearly sufficient. There are huge differences in the way various utilities record information about their services, and not only is there the possibility that they may be inaccurate, but there are also cases where the information is simply not available for one reason or another. It is no good thinking that because LSBUD shows nothing in the area to be excavated that it is necessarily the case. Just to begin with, there are still 700,000 kilometres of underground services that are not on the portal, according to Broome’s own figures.

This is why it is vital to carry out searches on the ground using the CAT and Genny. Furthermore, it is also no good taking them out of the box and simply reading the instructions. There is a lot more to locating and identifying underground services than that. This is why, at Sygma Solutions, we exist in the first place. Our training in the use of the Cat and Genny is second to none and includes classroom training and on-site training using the tools so that operatives can be confident in their abilities to locate services and avoid them. Our classroom training sessions are now also available online using first-class software that allows for live training and for delegates to be able to ask questions.