Thread: The Joy of Bush Living?

I always find it amazing how people dig through major back bone cables, they are generally clearly marked . In Wa we also have dial before you dig. But it still happens

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It happens few years ago in Bargara (near Bundaberg).
Some people never learn even if cost them thousands of dollars

Dial Before You Dig, what a joke. Totally inaccurate and if you read the fine print they accept no liability for incorrect information.

As a project manager for a public utility, where a large number of my projects involve digging long trenches to replace water mains in high density areas (Perth CBD), I can tell you we go to extreme lengths and cost to avoid digging other services up ... but it still happens. Please, please share with me how to avoid it by some trick that we aren't already trying.

My last project we used ground penetrating radar to locate all the services identified in the DBYD drawings. The road we were opening up a trench into had 300 - 350mm thick reinforced concrete base, so the GPR just picked up a maze of reinforcing bars! We concrete cut to 280mm as a first pass for about 500m. Then we came back to cut the last bit with the blade 80mm lower ... and promptly struck a traffic light control cable virtually stuck into the bottom of the concrete. Crap! That got fixed by 8:30pm - right through rush hour!

So how do we avoid that stuff? It scares me that one of my team could get injured, or worse, doing dumb work ... we should be at the beach reading a good book or out riding the bike or exploring in our Landys!

Sure would be good if DBYD was perfectly accurate but so much infrastructure was built before records were really done well. Pipes I'm replacing were installed between 1896 and 1904. How good do you reckon the drawings were?

Originally Posted by jonesfam

I thought, in my stupefied state, that it was the alarm, got out of bed & was brewing the coffee before I noticed it was bloody dark for 6am.

Did you get to sip the latte though?

When the company for which I was the IT manager/systems programmer was bought by a major organisation our computer system SW of Sydney was connected directly to the new parent company's system in both Melbourne and Sydney to provide a backup inland link for their traffic between those offices. It got used a few times when Telstra's main Sydney to Melbourne link went down.

Last time I used DBYD when I was building a new fence, they initially supplied a map for an area fifty kilometres away. When I eventually got a map of the right area it was totally useless - showed the nearest phone line was about half a kilometre away, but an above ground junction showed that it actually crossed the fenceline. Eventually Telstra sent out someone to trace the cable, and they were able to find it crossed the fence more or less at right angles, and crossed the road, then followed the opposite side of the road, not the fenceline, so there was no real problem. But it took a long time and a lot of trouble to find this out.

John

Some years back when I worked for the PMG, a contractor wanted to remove a large tree stump on a fence line between Dural and Glenorie. The lines staff went out and marked the location of the cable for him, which was on the footpath side of the stump. The contractor brought in an excavator to dig the stump. attacking it from inside the paddock. Suddenly Glenorie was isolated as the main cable went around the stump inside the paddock. There were a few faces with egg on them over that mess. Boy did I get some overtime having to test every circuit for correct polarity. Took over 12 hours to rectify. Jim