Foolish not to check for services before piling?

[Dreadnaught]

I was just chatting to a setting-out engineer. He was urging me to check with each and every utility for any services under my plot before the screw piles go in.

 

Mine is a rear garden plot and I am almost certain there is nothing there. The legal search at purchase-time revealed nothing. All the services are accounted for in the access road next to the plot. There are no manholes on the plot. There are no obvious reasons why any service would cross it. There is only one old terracotta land drain that I know about on the plot.

 

On the other hand, the piles will descend up to 8 metres.

 

I am reluctant to spend the time and cost of contacting every utility. Am I being foolish?

Edited July 6, 2020 by Dreadnaught

[ToughButterCup]

Our piling company would not  proceed unless I showed them evidence of our correspondence confirming no known services on the plot. (They all ran alongside the plot in the road)

[ProDave]

Read this before you do anything

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7817277/Hundreds-furious-customers-left-no-internet-days-Virgin-Media-goes-down.htmlhttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7817277/Hundreds-furious-customers-left-no-internet-days-Virgin-Media-goes-down.html

 

Sorry DM link.

[Dreadnaught]

Thanks both! OK message received  although my screw piles look puny compared to that beast in the photo.

 

Looked in my files, I do have a map of the both the water supply and electricity cables in the area. These were supplied with the quotes for the connections. They both show no services on the plot. Is that sort of map good enough for the purpose do you think?

 

The only ones missing would be gas, which I am not connecting to, and which I would need to check; and drains.

[SuperJohnG]

 

https://www.linesearchbeforeudig.co.uk/

 

Should be of some help. Has all th records and notifies everyone .I used it to check our rural plot.  Although  it doesn't pick up BT stuff.

[Ferdinand]

There could of course be some there  that they have all forgotten about ?.

Edited July 6, 2020 by Ferdinand

[ProDave]

Interesting footnote.

 

in 2003 when we bought our first plot up here, we got a very cheap connection fee, because SSE said there was a "spare" cable in an adjacent plot, that had been paid for by that plot's owner but never connected (because that plot had not been actually built on)

 

When they came to connect our plots (there were two adjacent plots expecting to join onto this cable) they could not find it.  So at their own expense, SSE ran a new cable down the road from the substation.

 

Fast forward to 2015, we now owned that unbuilt plot with the missing cable.  I was aware of the story of this missing cable so was careful when digging.  I did in fact uncover a cable, but it looked somewhat small, but I called SSE to look. they cut into it to find it was a multicore cable but not twisted pair and not a telecoms cable.

 

I uncovered and severed that unknown multicore cable again on a different part of the plot.  Nobody complained their telephone stopped working.

 

So to summarise, a cable that should have been there was never found. And a cable that nobody knew anything about was found.

 

My best guess is our site was part of a former saw mill.  We uncovered a load of buried bricks and broken roof tiles.  I suspect this mystery cable could have been an old private telecoms link from a site hut where we are, which was the log store area, to the actual saw mill at the top of the road.

[Dreadnaught]

Thanks all. I'm on site at my plot tomorrow meeting Anglian Water. I currently live 2+ hours away so cannot visit every day. Will have good nosey around the plot looking for evidence of anything underground before taking it further.

[Temp]

4 hours ago, Dreadnaught said:

The legal search at purchase-time revealed nothing

 

Did your solicitor request copies of their asset maps to do the searches? Ask him if he still has copies.

[Mr Punter]

I think you will be fine.  I have seen some footage of piling in London where they have drilled into the London Underground and you can see where the auger has gone through into a tunnel.  Fibre optic cable seems to be the most expensive to repair if you hit a major one and it twists around the auger.

[Dreadnaught]

2 minutes ago, Temp said:

Did your solicitor request copies of their asset maps to do the searches? Ask him if he still has copies.

 

That's a good idea! Thanks.

[Declan52]

If you are doing work and you hit any kind of utility and it's under 1.2m your insurance company will fight you over the costs. This is the standard distance your should be hand digging to and using a cat scanner. After that depth and you hit something its just bad luck. I have hit everything going over the years. Put me in a field up a mountain and I will dig through the only pipe or cable in it. 

[the_r_sole]

the worst thing is when you bother to do the searches and then discover that the utility companies have just made up their maps from the tops of their head, on a monday morning after a hard weekend!!

We had to get Scottish Water to come out and confirm their sewer was at the edge of a site, where they had bought the land from my client 15 years earlier to put the sewer in - their searches said there was nothing within 300m of the site!

[Ferdinand]

7 minutes ago, Declan52 said:

If you are doing work and you hit any kind of utility and it's under 1.2m your insurance company will fight you over the costs. This is the standard distance your should be hand digging to and using a cat scanner. After that depth and you hit something its just bad luck. I have hit everything going over the years. Put me in a field up a mountain and I will dig through the only pipe or cable in it. 

 

Reminds me  of the time I was nearly up a hill near Salisbury because that's where  the telephone was put to follow the new road.

 

Then they realigned the new road.

 

At one time I was at ATC, and someone put something through the data link wire. Cheap to repair, but the consequences run to 10s of millions very quickly.

Edited July 6, 2020 by Ferdinand

[Temp]

26 minutes ago, Dreadnaught said:

 

That's a good idea! Thanks.

If he hasn't ask him for the addressees where he writes to. 

 

I was able to get maps in hours by claiming to be digging on site and had found a pipe/cable. Asked if I could drop in and pick up a map. They want co-ordinates and a scale so prepared that before calling. 

[Adrian Walker]

Make sure you have insurance against this.  Contractors are not liable if they cut through any service. I had a digger cut though an underground high voltage cable.