When undertaking any sort of work that involves digging in the ground, it is vital to take every step to find out if there are any underground services running in the area in which a contractor is about to excavate or even close by.

Underground services can be absolutely anywhere. Depending upon whose figures you believe, there are anywhere between 1.5 million and 2.5 million kilometres of underground services running in the UK, and that is a lot! Some places are obvious, such as under the highway and pavements in towns and cities. Virtually every building in the land has electricity running to it, apart, perhaps, from a croft on some remote Scottish island. Those same buildings also contain toilets, so there will be sewage pipes, and most of them have running water.

Most buildings also have telecoms, tv cables, and so on, and a vast majority also have mains gas. Furthermore, while many places obviously have underground services, they can also be found in places where you simply wouldn’t imagine them to be, such as running through woodland or across a field out in the country. However, that woodland or field may just be the shortest way between two villages and that is why there are underground services there. In addition, there might be a gateway with a track leading from it which might not look very much but could lead to a mansion half a mile off a lane in a remote part of the countryside.

So, yes, underground services can literally be anywhere. Well perhaps not at the top of Mount Snowdon, but you take the point. This is why it is critical to take every possible measure to locate and identify underground services before ever putting a spade into the ground.

The first step is to approach all the local utility companies and ask for information. Many of them will be able to produce plans – STATS – showing where their services run. However, it is extremely dangerous to rely on these alone. Many of them are incomplete, and in some instances just plain wrong. In other cases, although there may be services there, the STATS don’t exist at all. In addition, there has ever been a national standard for keeping records of underground services, so different utilities will have different methods of storing and recording information. STATS should be considered as for information purposes only and used as a guide, not relied on as gospel.

There is also now a national record which more and more local authorities and utilities are joining called Line Search Before U Dig (LSBUD), but at present only a little over half of the utilities have their records on it. Certainly, it is worth carrying out a search – the service is free to use – but again it cannot be totally relied upon.

There is only one way to deal with this problem and that is to undertake a physical survey of the area before any digging commences using the CAT and Genny. Used correctly, by a surveyor who has been properly trained, these two tools can locate and identify most underground services, but even then it is necessary to proceed with caution because they do have certain limitations.

One obvious one, if you think about it, is depth. There is a limit to how deep the tools can locate a service. If you have not been trained in the correct manner of usage, it is still possible to suffer a cable strike even when the CAT and Genny told you there was nothing there!

For example, let’s say that they can locate services to a depth of 2 metres. If a service is buried at 2.5 metres, you may conclude that there is nothing there. The way to deal with this problem is to begin to dig carefully and then having got a foot or so down, take another reading. You may still get a negative result. Dig down another foot and do it again. This time you may get a positive result.

This is just one of the things that we teach in our CAT and Genny training courses at Sygma Solutions, and it is why they are critical for all operatives who need to be able to locate underground services.