Training In The Avoidance of Underground Services Is Essential

When it comes to excavation work, ensuring safety and preventing potential disruptions to underground services is of paramount importance. It is estimated that there are some 2.5 million km of underground services in the UK, and in an average year contractors strike one or other of them some 60,000 times. That’s over 1,150 cable strikes every week!

The Foremost Provider Of Training In The Location Of Underground Services

Sygma Solutions is a leading provider of specialist training in the location of underground services and utilities. With our extensive knowledge and experience in the field, Sygma Solutions is committed to ensuring that individuals and businesses have the necessary skills and knowledge to operate safely and efficiently around underground services.

Our CAT Training Courses Are Essential For Locating Underground Services

When you plug your mobile phone into the socket on the wall to recharge it, switch on your air fryer, or fire up your laptop, everything works absolutely perfectly. What we never think about is what is happening. Sure, it’s electricity, but so what?

You can’t connect to the electricity without it first being produced and then supplied to your property by miles and miles of cables. In this case, it has been estimated to be anywhere between 1.5 million and 2.5 million miles of them – all of which run under the ground to get to your home and those of everyone else in the UK.

Avoiding Striking Underground Services Is Critical When Excavating

Industry insiders understand that it is critical to avoid striking any underground services when commencing any sort of work that involves digging into the soil, whether that is using a digger such as a JCB or just a fork and shovel. We know that there are at least 1.5 million km of services that run underground in the UK, and the unfortunate fact is that we also know that there are some 60,000 cable strikes a year. A “cable strike” is an overall term which covers any sort of utility, which may be cables, pipes, and so on. Indeed, there are some 60,000 cable strikes a year. Looked at another way, that is 165 every single day!

Our Cable Avoidance Training Covers The Limitations Of The Equipment Used

Any contractor that is required to undertake excavation work in the course of a project should, without question, carry out a thorough survey of the site before commencing any digging, whether by hand or machine. A cable strike can, and often does, cause serious injuries to workers on the site, and these can sometimes be fatal.

Indeed, the HSE gives an example of a company which was fined £210,000 after a worker was killed by an explosion when he and other workers were using breakers and a shovel and struck an 11,000-volt live cable. The HSE stated “The company had not informed workers that there were live cables in the excavation and failed to put adequate measures in place to prevent them being damaged”.

How Can Excavators Cause Cable Strikes?

A cable strike is one of those unintentional and unforeseen situations that cause health and safety hazards to the engineers and immense financial loss to the service provider. One of the common causes of a cable strike is the lack of proper site inspection before excavation. Even a slight collision with a spade can electrocute an individual. Sygma Solutions offers training and detailed insight to utility engineers about avoiding such situations while working. Over the years, we have become a trusted name among many.

Get Cable Avoidance and HSG47 Training by Sygma Solutions

Sygma Solutions, a reputable training provider, specialises in offering excellent buried utility location courses. The company is a CITB ATO-approved training provider- a badge that gives it an extra edge. While working with cable locator manufacturers, we decode Utility Surveying Knowledge and combine it with a range of foreign experiences. We are well known for reducing utility strikes with contractors and utility companies, for putting it succinctly. One-day cable location courses and five-day utility surveyor courses that include cable avoidance training approved by The Survey Association (TSA) are also available.

The ProQual Level 2 Award In Utility Avoidance

The ProQual Level 2 Award in Utility Avoidance and the Location of Buried Services in Construction is aimed at site managers, supervisors, and excavation operatives in order that they have an understanding of the avoidance of danger from striking underground services. The awarding body is the ProQual Awarding Body which comes under the regulating body which is Ofqaul (the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation).

The Costs Of A Cable Strike Can Be Considerable

Construction workers who are required to carry out any sort of excavation work, whether by hand or the use of a digger, can be at risk of serious injury, and even death, if they should strike an underground cable or pipe in the course of the work.

Workers themselves are in the front line, so to speak, but the ramifications can go a lot further than that. If you should strike an underground service on any contract, it will at the very least mean that the service is out of action and the workers have to down tools while the utility company sends out men to repair it. That costs time and money for the contracting company.

Cable Avoidance Training Is Essential If You Need To Locate Underground Services

Any type of construction work requires a lot of thought and planning before it ever begins, and we don’t just mean the architectural side of things. When you build anything much larger than a garden shed, the first physical work involves digging down into the ground in order to construct the foundations, but that also requires planning.

There are underground services all over the place, and they can be anywhere, even in situations where you might be forgiven for thinking that there would not be any. Quite obviously they will be present in an industrial or residential estate, and in your local high street, shopping centre, and so on. But out in the middle of a field? Yes. They could be. As we have said before, that field might just be the shortest route from one village to another. Or there could be a property tucked away half a mile down a lane.