Dig safely — excavation work and work near buried cables

Because such large parts of the electricity, fibre, gas, district heating and water network today lie underground, excavation work is one of the most common causes of accidents in utilities. A misdiraced shovel or an excavator working without line information can quickly hit a line it should not have touched.

§What is LER?

LER stands for Wiring Owner Register — a legally required register where owners of buried wiring, including utilities, fiber companies, gas companies, district heating companies and water companies, must register their wiring networks. Before a digging job starts, you must enquire in LER to find out which wiring owners have wiring in the area.

• 01Check LER before final planning of excavation work
• 02Procurement and logistics
• 03Mark the actual lines in the field from the received information
• 04Use hand excavation or similar careful methods close to known utilities

§What happens if you dig incorrectly?

If an electrical cable is damaged during excavation work, there is a risk of electrical shock to the person doing the digging and a power outage that can affect many customers at once until the fault is located and repaired. If the rules on line marking and cable location information were not followed correctly, the person who carried out the excavation work may also be held liable for the damage.

§Your responsibility as a utility operator

As a utility operator you often sit in both roles: You are the one who must dig carefully when repairing or expanding a cable network and at the same time you are the one whose cables other contractors must protect when working nearby. Therefore good knowledge of LER cable information and correct marking is a fixed part of daily cooperation with excavation companies and other cable owners.

§Other line owners in the same ground

A power cable rarely goes into the ground alone. Fibre companies, gas companies, district heating plants and water suppliers typically also have lines in the same area, and all these line owners are subject to the same duty to register their lines in LER. This means that a query in the register often provides a comprehensive overview of several different types of infrastructure at once — making it possible to coordinate excavation work so that all parties' lines are respected.

This coordination is also part of the background for co-excavation where electrical and fiber cables are laid in the same excavation. Here it is particularly important that all parties involved know each other's cable routing exactly so you don't risk damaging another cable owner's cable while working on laying new.

§A habit that must never become routine

The greatest danger in excavation work often arises not because someone consciously skips the procedure but because a task that has been done hundreds of times before without problems finally starts to feel like pure routine. For precisely this reason it is important to maintain the habit of checking LER and obtaining line information every single time — no matter how well you think you know the area and no matter how busy things are on site.

This attention is also something you as a supply operator take with you in cooperation with external contractors who need to excavate near the utility company's own lines. The clearer you communicate requirements and expectations for marking and caution the lower the risk that an otherwise well-planned task by another actor ends up damaging your own part of the network.

Good routines around earthworks and excavation are therefore not just a technical detail in the apprenticeship — it is a fundamental part of the professional standard you build throughout your apprenticeship, and which you take with you, regardless of which network company you end up working for.

“The most important excavation machine on a construction site is often the one that never puts the bucket in the ground until all line information is in place.”