National Safe Digging Week 2022
The 4th of July marks an important awareness week for us at LSBUD – National Safe Digging Week.
Through initiatives such as National Safe Digging Week, there has never been more awareness around the benefits of searching before digging. Construction workers, contractors and the general public are now more conscious of what pipes and cables might lie beneath them, keeping people and networks safer than ever.
To help spread some safe digging awareness, we have highlighted the top five consequences of ‘digging blind’:
- Serious Injury/death
It should go without saying but striking an electricity cable or a gas/high pressure fuel pipeline can result in serious injury, or fatality. Given that it takes less than two minutes to perform an asset search, and anyone can undertake a search, there is no barrier to doing the right thing.
- Costly repairs
Asset strikes not only cause damage to pipes and cables and harm to the person/people doing the digging, but they are also incredibly costly, hitting businesses hard in the pocket.
In the latest Digging Up Britain report, it suggests that, based on research by the University of Birmingham, the true cost of a utility strike is almost 29 times more than the direct cost of the strike. This means that the true cost of a ‘typical’ £3,000 utility strike is nearly £90,000.
- Substantial flooding
There is a perception that ‘hitting’ a water pipe is less significant than striking an electricity cable or high pressure fuel line, but this is far from the truth. The implications are just different. There may be less of an initial risk to life when a water pipe bursts, but the damage can still be substantial and implications to customers served by the network very significant.
In 2019, a farmer from Derbyshire hit a water pipe whilst knocking in some fence posts, causing a 100ft ‘wall of water’. This triggered floods that cascaded down to neighbouring villages and caused severe damage to homes, businesses and livelihoods.
- Cutting Off Critical Utilities
Third party damage is one of the main contributors to outages, leaving neighbourhoods and residents unable to perform necessary, everyday tasks. This causes disruption to communities and embarrassment to the ‘culprit’. Plus, it has a real and costly impact on the utility provider, leaving reputations in tatters, or with them fundamentally not able to supply a service to their customers.
- No broadband, no WFH
With working from home becoming increasingly popular, especially post-COVID, having a reliable broadband connection is essential. Simply put, if there is no service, people are not able to do their job.
So, minimising disruption and avoiding any fibre/cable damage from third parties is crucial. This is easily done with a quick search.
To find out more about National Safe Digging Week, please visit: https://lsbud.co.uk/national-safe-digging-week/
