One of the biggest issues facing construction contractors and utility companies is the fact that there are some 2.5 million kilometres of services running underground in the UK, and that is only one estimate. Others put the figure at 4 million kilometres, but even if that is incorrect and the 2.5 million is right, that is still a lot of services running underground.

Let’s face it: practically everything we need runs underground. All right, some telecoms are connected to buildings by wires and telegraph poles, but everything else is buried. Furthermore, underground services can be absolutely anywhere. OK, they may not be on the top of Mount Snowdon, but they can be almost anywhere else. They will obviously be in the high street and in residential areas and industrial estates and so on, but they can also be out in the country where you might not expect to find them. Even down a country lane, there may be a couple of houses or a farm at the end of it, and they all need electricity, water, sewage pipes, telecoms, and so on.

Virtually everything needs some form of digging. If you are building anything bigger than a garden shed, it will need foundations. Utility companies are constantly engaged in digging and repairing or replacing their services, especially water companies who are keen to repair leaks as quickly as possible.

One of the biggest problems is that many of the contractors carrying out excavation work fail to undertake any form of search for the location of buried services before they begin work.

First Obtain Utility Plans

The first thing that you need to do before digging is to obtain plans from the various utility companies locally in order to see if there are services running in the spot that you need to excavate. However, this can produce results which cannot be relied on, or may not produce any results at all. In some cases, there may simply be no record, while in others the records can be seriously out of date. For example, many water records originate from drawings that became microfiches and then computer records; across each iteration, errors may have crept in, while changes to nearby roads or buildings can skew the original descriptions.

On top of that, there may be records which are inaccurate because of other reasons. For instance, a contractor may have been required to install a service on behalf of a utility company at a certain depth, but in order to save time and money it was laid at a shallower depth. The utility believes that its’ record is right, but it isn’t.

Removing an old utility also takes time and it could be that it is recorded as having been removed but in fact is still there. The manager of one plant hire company explained “Occasionally you’ve got secondary gas pipelines laid in parallel alongside or underneath old pipelines, and the old pipelines are on the records, but the new pipelines have never been added. It’s staggering, but this does happen.”

All of this is why it is critical to undertake a thorough survey of a site using the CAT and Genny before ever beginning to dig. All surveyors who are going to undertake this work need CAT training in order to ensure that they are totally familiar with the use of the tools in all modes, and also cognisant of the fact that they are not infallible.

The CAT training courses that we provide at Sygma Solutions are designed to ensure that operatives fully understand how to use these tools, and they will undertake practical training on site as well, so that they can be confident when using them to locate and identify underground services.