When you are engaged on any contract which means that the ground needs to be broken, there are a huge number of hidden dangers. The simple fact is that there are all sorts of underground services wherever you may happen to be. In fact, depending upon whose figures you believe, there are anywhere between 1.5 million and 2 million kilometres of underground services in the UK, and the simple fact that nobody actually knows the true figures shows you that they can be absolutely anywhere.

Furthermore, underground services can be at almost any depth. By and large, they will not be more than about 10 or 12 feet below ground, but you simply don’t know where they are. Certainly, lots of utilities keep records but the problem is that they can be far from accurate. In addition to that, there is no designated national system of recording underground utilities, so you will find that different utilities use different methods of recording.

Then, of course, there can be several different utilities running underground in the same place. An obvious situation is a high street, where you have electricity, water, sewage, telecoms, broadband fibre optic, and there may be gas, just for starters.

The fact is that utility strikes occur on a regular basis. It is calculated that there are four million excavation projects taking place in the UK every year, and it is known that there are some 60,000 utility strikes every year. Many of these utility strikes go unrecorded for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that some contractors do not want to have them on their record.

Utility strikes at the very least cause downtime for businesses and residents in the area, and this can mean that there are claims for damages that can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds. Worse still, they cause injuries that can range from minor to severe to the workers involved, and which in some cases result in death. Around a dozen, workers die from injuries sustained in utility strikes every year.

All of this means that before you even consider putting a spade into the ground there is a lot of work that needs to be done. The Health and Safety Executive has produced guidance in a handbook known as HSG47 which is critical reading for everyone engaged in any sort of excavation work. It is divided into four sections as follows:

• Identifying and managing the dangers.
• Planning the work.
• Detecting, identifying and marking underground services.
• Safe excavation.

The first of these involves obtaining records from utilities in the area in which you are going to dig. However, these must never be taken as gospel as they can often be inaccurate. For example, a utility may employ a contractor to lay service and instruct that contractor that it must be at a depth of, say, five feet. In order to save time, and therefore money, the contractor may only dig down two feet. When the job is finished, everything is covered over, and the utility believes that its’ service is at a depth of five feet and that is what will show on the record. That is just one reason why the record may be inaccurate.

Regarding planning the work, one should always plan it to avoid the services wherever possible, but of course, in many cases, this is not possible. Furthermore, in some instances, the work needs to be carried out quickly, as in the case of a burst water pipe for instance.

This is why it is essential to conduct a survey of the area to be excavated using the appropriate tools and equipment. This is what we teach operatives how to do at Sygma Solutions in our HSG47 training course.

Furthermore, while we are always able to carry out training here at our HQ in Wigan, we are also prepared to work on a suitable site anywhere in the UK, So, if you are searching for “HSG47 training near me” then that’s us. We are near you!

In addition, since the arrival of the pandemic, we have also included online training for all of the classroom elements of our courses, and the sessions are always live and interactive, so it is just like being in the classroom from the point of view of learning.