If you are a contractor who is going to undertake any sort of excavation work, the very first thing you should do is to undertake a survey of the area in which you nee to dig in order to establish what, if any, buried services are in the place that you are working or very close to it.
The plain facts are that there are unknown thousands of miles of electricity cables, gas pipes, water pipes, sewage pipes, telecoms, fibre optic cables, and more, buried underground in this country, and some of them are in places which might seem most unlikely. The grim figures are that there are some 60,000 cases of strikes on underground utilities every year in the UK – many of them causing severe injury, and some fatal – DESPITE the fact that responsible contractors take precautions before digging. That is over 230 every working day!
This is why you should assume, unless you know otherwise, that there are services in the area that you need to excavate. Surveyors will be familiar with the use of the CAT and Genny but many are not aware of their limitations. This is why anyone undertaking surveys using the CAT and Genny needs to attend a professional CAT and Genny course that covers everything that they can and can't do and gains some practical experience in the field. It is not enough just to buy the equipment and read the instructions. A CAT course run by a professional company will cover everything that a surveyor needs to know.
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