Evening all,

I am presently studying at Leeds Met, BSc Safety Health and Environmental Management (excellent course) I was hoping for your assistance with my Honours project.

I am seeking assistance with obtaining detailed statistics and data regarding any incidents, near misses etc with relationship to Buried services in general and the root causes of these incidents.

I would appreciate major construction group / HSE participation / assistance.

In line with Ethical requirements all information provided shall be used only with your consent

Thanks for the response, I am aware of the casations and I am seeking the utility companies to assist. thanks for your thoughts

Going off at a slight tangent, but hopefully of use to Summersgill25492 a bit of advice on a recent incident would be appreciated…

Civils crew of three (with experienced foreman) excavating near a known HV cable, all marked up & identified. Procedure is to hand dig near it to locate, which they had done. They had to dig a trench alongside it to fit some gabion baskets. Permit said to hand dig, they for whatever reason (ease/laziness – they said because ground was ‘crumbling’) used a machine bucket – nicked cable. They got out of the way, a short time later there was a big flash and bang (I’m told that electric companies are set up to send automatic surges down lines when they detect a fault – sounds dangerous to me!). No one injured, all reported, lots of disciplinary action etc. etc, etc.

Same crew a few days later had to excavate to locate same cable in three other locations close to each other. Ground scanned & cable located, obviously they’re not stupid & they don’t use a machine again. Cable first found at one point 800mm down, in a duct with cable tape & sand above, found next point 800mm down in a duct with cable tape and sand above. At third point (midway between these two) operator put a fork (insulated – using it through very compacted earth/brick)) through it at 350mm depth, which made him jump a bit. There was no duct, no marker tape & no sand.

My question is – what else should our crew have done to make sure they didn’t hit it? The repair crew say they never dig by hand – only by machine, yet all training & HSE guidance says to hand dig. Any advice/guidance would be gratefully received.

Hi Summersgill,

I am involved in this industry and most of the utilities are very guarded about sharing cable strike data. It may be worth contacting the National Joint Utilities Group (NJUG) http://www.njug.org.uk/
for some advice. I believe that they have a number of founder members across the utlities industry that may be willing to contribute to your research.

U also have to note that the different bodies e.g. Gas, electricity, water, telecoms, broad band etc. work in silos so they would have info about their own areas only and would not be interested if 'another' service was hit as long as theirs was OK


The big insurance companies are holders of info but if they have connected data bases [apart from what to charge] that could appraise situations, strike types etc. I would be surprised