Tuesday 22 October 2019

Striking underground services when digging can be fatal

When you are a contractor who is often called upon to undertake any sort of works which involve breaking the ground, you have to be extremely careful to avoid striking any underground services. This might seem an obvious thing to say, but the fact remains that there are somewhere around 60,000 strikes of underground services every year – about 230 every single working day up and down the country.



This is not just in order to avoid damage to the services themselves, although that’s bad enough, it is all the other problems which can arise, not the least of which is an injury to the worker or workers who cut into or damage the service. Serious injury happens frequently, and there are around a dozen fatalities every year just as a result of striking underground services.

Depending whose figures you believe, there are anywhere up to 1.5 MILLION kilometres of underground services in this country, so they can be anywhere. Even if it is not 1.5 million, it is certainly above one million marks. OK, we all expect to find electricity cables, telephone cables, water pipes, sewage trunking, gas pipes, and so on in the local high street. But services can be found anywhere, even in places where you would NOT expect to find them.

Read more information: CAT and Genny

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