Too late, the fibre bringing the internet to our business park was modified by a JCB this morning...

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinweisschilder_zu_Stra%C3%9Feneinbauten

that said, still even then there are occasional incidents of baggers digging up phone lines or damaging a gas pipe.

If ze Krauts can do it, you can do it!

Total Inability To Show Underground Pipes

Somebody can't count. Headline, "Hitting underground ... costs the UK £2.4bn a year". Text body says, "industry could save £350m a year by avoiding accidental asset strikes". So this system might prevent one strike in seven?

"industry could save £350m a year by avoiding accidental asset strikes"

The other £2.05bn is from intentional asset strikes.

You joke, but I have heard a digger driver state that he'll happily cut through a water pipe if it's in his way - that's what his insurance is for.

I bet he doesn't say that about HV electrical cables or gas pipes.

I saw the consequences of that.. amazing fire, melted the plastic blinds in the buildings nearby

JCB burnt and they claimed they had a paper map on the jcb (I did not see that before the fire, I did see reckless operation).

In Spain the maps are known.. in theory

I gave direct instructions to a third party that wanted to work above our assets to dig-by-hand only and request the presence of one of our ops personnel while undertaking works to ensure they do not hit them. Per the guidance in HSG47.

10km away from the site in question we had just had a cable strike from a different third party. I shared the details of said incident with the the new enquiry; photographs, burn damage etc.

6 months later I recieved an incident report where a sub-contractor to a sub-contractor to the third party, has jammed their JCB bucket through said asset. No request made for ops personnel to attend the dig.

The JCB driver didn't speak a word of English and had essentially been told go-over-there and do so and so; which he duly did and swiped the cable. No evidence that the requirements of digging safely in that location had made it down to the bottom subcontractor in the chain. He's also bloody lucky to be alive.

The incident in question contributed to the catastrophic failure of a large and expensive circuit breaker besides severing the cable; which could have caused fatalities had anyone been within 100m of it at the time.

Was there anything I could have humanly done to prevent the incident? Short of doing the work myself? What do we have to do, say to all third parties that they can't work in proximity to our equipment and have to pay us to do it? We do not have that degree of land ownership to remotely consider such an approach?

I lost a lot of sleep over this incident that should never have happened, if the right people were to talk to each other. Initiatives like this are good ideas, but the proof is in the delivery.

This is just another case of too far down the sub-contractor rabbit hole.

"I lost a lot of sleep over this incident"

Yes, you should have done. If someone got seriously hurt, you'd have been prosecuted.

While you can never prevent an idiot giving stupid instructions to an innocent, you can make sure the whole process is documented and said idiot has had to do something spectacularly stupid, deliberately ignore the process, etc. At that point you're at least covered against legal action.

Always been a problem. Even where they exist the maps aren't reliable, and for most businesses it's cheaper to just dig than to take the time to search for underground plant, and/or to dig delicately just in case. Even if the insurance doesn't pay it's still usually cheaper for the business just to pay up. The dangerous ones (gas, HV electricity) are in fairly predictable places, and have warning mesh above them. Fibre and phone, it costs too much in time and labour to care in advance.

Presumably it costs the diggers that amount in wasted time, the rest is the money lost by everyone else affected.

Regardless this seems a rare case of public sector IT actually doing something useful and with a defined outcome… as long as companies all contribute.

One of the other issues is that alot of services are in unknown locations..

Out local power company managed to "not be sure" that the farmers field wasn't being powered by the cable they had laid a mere 18 months earlier, despite it being the same person on site (who did remember putting the cable in, and knew we were the only property supplied by it) - computer said "don't know"... farmers fields aren't known for using a lot of power, and it's a good half mile to the nearest roundabout (which probably takes power from the power lines along the main roads feeding it)

Yup. I suspect a lot (perhaps the majority) of cable/service strikes are not because no one checked to see if there was anything there, but because they only checked the record plans, and the record plans can be far from accurate.

Active confirmation of services locations is increasingly expected / undertaken (PAS128 survey type A or B).

But didn't we all have this conversation about a month ago?

>One of the other issues is that alot of services are in unknown locations..

Another is that they aren't in the location the plans or system says they are.

A laugh I have is that my house is 3ft closer to the road than indicated on the plan, but it is in the right place if you use the geographic data off the plan - I know this because the OS surveyed it.

The problem was that the road was built 3ft off the plan location, given they had already done the foundations for my house the only option was to build the house between mine and the road 3ft closer to my house, but failed to amend the plan... Result neighbour thought the boundary fence should be located 3ft into my land rather than being located where it was...

So what ties to MP's/comittee members do they have, not that I'm cynical.

With Blighty's rep for witchcraft and other arcane sciences, I would think that dowsing for cables and pipes would be the norm.

I used dowsing in many years as a land surveyor. It works better than many metal detectors.

In fairness, I wouldn't expect a metal detector to detect underground streams. The clue is in the name: it detects metal, not fluidic conductors coursing at a rate of knots.

....the database will be useless.

Multiple engineers have rocked up asking if I knew where the cables ran across the road as the documention hadn't been updated for decades.

This was typical across multiple towns.

>documention hadn't been updated for decades.

So long as the cablea are non-migratory

Agreed. BT's asset register is, in my experience, low quality.

To be fair: BT Openreach do maintain a *very* large estate of assets, so even a single percentage error is still going to result in a large numbers of errors.

Privatisation is the cause. I recall that in the mid 1980's that BT were implementing a database system using laserdiscs, not just for BT cables, but applicable for other pipes in the ground.

Such an important service/capability was not seen as money making or beneficial, so did not get funding.

Having worked at BT Labs (above was not BT Labs) there were some fantastic ground breaking products that never saw the light of day, such as video phones using ISDN (2B+D) - that was 30 years ago.

such as video phones using ISDN (2B+D)

I was using video conferencing kit running over ISDN-2 well over a decade ago. (I fondly remember trying to bond multiple ISDN-2s - it was very fragile!)

This was during the era of "sleepy ISDN" (If you didn't use your ISDN-2 circuit for a while, BT would recycle the exchange line card for another customer as there wasn't enough capacity)

Privatisation is the cause.

Not really, most of the plant whose location is uncertain long predates privatisation.

I also worked for BT Labs, and there were plenty of good products that did make it. Many that didn't were technically clever, but had little market appeal. Video phones were a case in point, at the time they and their required network connectivity were too expensive for widespread use. 2B+D ISDN at 128 + 16kbit/s simply didn't give a useful experience until the mid-90s, CODECs were still too basic. Those were the days when the BTRL video conference suite needed 2Mbit/s connectivity.

I created a similar system in Spain.. the quality of the input data was.. "interesting".

There is a full European framework for that, in use by the Dutch and Belgians, why not just use that?

A few years ago I accidentally put a fence post spike through the gas feed pipe to my house. It was buried about 50cm underneath my front garden. Beforehand I had asked Cadent, the local council, and the house builders and not one of them had a clue where the gas/electric feeds went. So, I put the spikes in and one of them hit the yellow plastic gas pipe. Luckily I smelt the gas before it blew up my house and I managed to claim the cost of the fix (£1000) on my house insurance. The Cadent guys who came out to fix the leak told me that the feed was too shallow (should be over 60cm deep) and that I was lucky as the main electric feed for the house was next to it and I had missed that by millimetres. It turns out that cheap builders only dig one trench and lay the gas and electric feed in the same one. Sounds dangerous as **** to me!!

Wait till you find out how many data centers have multiple independent fibre links - all in the same conduit

> "Sounds dangerous as **** to me!!"

Especially given your handle, Big_Boomer

10,000+ cable strikes per year, hitting the HV Distro networks. Any of which have potential for fatalities, and obviously, supply loss.

This is partially because services like "dial before you dig" are relying on data manually copied from 100 year old drawings using references like "cable 2 ft from kerb edge".

That means, given changes in road design and construction over that period, the info on where the cable is, is at best very uncertain.

The old GIS for Gas Systems has other problems; chiefly they are "2-D" and have no concept of vertical lines feeding into, for instance, tower blocks. At the time they were built, they were cutting edge, but somewhat old hat now. And not that old really, as infrastructure systems go.

Going back and re-cataloguing it using current technology is absolutely possible in a GIS environment. Should we have a centrally controlled register of all utilities and their locations to this standard? Yes. Who is going to fund building it.. There's your problem. Nobody is prepared to fund such things with no (direct) financial benefit.

Crossrail had a team of 70+ staff employed building digital twins of their infrastructure, and that is but a fraction of the scale of what's needed to catalogue national infrastructure.

A/C because I'm employed in one of the utilities and have long blown the trumpet about crap data leading to crap decisions. Though I do enjoy time capsules like the drawings of cables I have from the 1940's, where you can see where they were repaired and re-routed following bomb damage.

I thought this was already a thing. It was certainly being talked about in the '90s when Nynex were busy digging up everything. They certainly found the location of a large number of underground services, usually by damaging them!

But there is no uniform process for "asset owners" – the gas, water, telecoms or electricity companies who dig up roads to lay pipes and cables – to share their data about where exactly they have put everything.

The antics of those customers suggests the main obstacle isn't the lack of a platform, it's their existing lack of data about exactly where they've put everything.

So did the CEO of Atkins go to Eton with Boris the Liar or does Atkins run the sweet shop at the end of one of his cronies streets?

So they just found out about https://lsbud.co.uk/

and the underground asset register they announced in 2019? https://www.gov.uk/government/news/map-of-underground-pipes-and-cables-designed-to-save-lives-and-prevent-major-disruption

The trouble is that keeping records costs money. Keeping GOOD records costs a lot of money. That word "cost" is anathema to most companies, especially after the utilities were privatised.

Even where legislation exists about keeping records, the bare minimum will be done to comply with the law.

If your service is listed as being in a place that someone else digs into, that's the digger's fault.

If a place is apparently free of your service and someone hits something you didn't record, well tough. The company that failed to update their records should be liable for cost of repairs.

That's the only encouragement they need.

Although that adds costs.

If I'm going to be responsible for damage where I dig then I don't just want a 1-800-CALL-BEFORE-YOU-DIG I'm going to need the precise locations in writing, signed by a director, witnesed and filed with my lawyers before I set foot on site. From every water, gas, power, telco, etc that MIGHT have services in that area.

If a water main bursts in a High St on a friday evening then it's going to take till well into Monday before anyone can start work.

I'm going to need the precise locations in writing, signed by a director, witnesed and filed with my lawyers before I set foot on site.

You're never going to get it, and the job will go to someone less picky.

20-30 years ago I worked in a GIS company that had a significant percentage of the UK's utility firms as customers. With water companies in particular, the assets are so old that they have no idea where a load of them are. I remember one company telling us "well, the water pipe goes into the farmer's field here but we have no idea where it goes after that, but if we shut it off we get complaints from 5 different villages, even though they're supposed to be fed by different pipes".

In other cases it's the usual "as built" ≠ "as designed". Gas pipes 10 feet away from where the map says, electricity cables only 18 inches down when they're supposed to be 6 feet down (that one took out the power in my neighbourhood when the local council put it a parking restriction sign), stuff rerouted because of a Victorian sewer that wasn't supposed to exist.

Good luck to whoever gets the job, because they're seriously going to need it.

>Good luck to whoever gets the job, because they're seriously going to need it.

I don't think the contract is to find all the stuff

I don't think it's even to record all the stuff

It will probably end up being a web page with links to various utility companies 'contact us' page

Apparently, some rodents chewed through broadband cables in Devon, taking out comms. to some 1800 properties.

I think that happened yesterday.

OpenBreach are investigating.

That could be a security problem.

With this new system the rodents would know exactly where to dig.

What precautions are being put into place to prevent toothy herbivores accessing this data ?