Locating and Marking Underground Cable Before Groundwork at an Ōtara School
Project overview
Scope of work
- Underground cable location across three areas of a live school site
- Survey with a cable locating device and GPR scanner
- Ground marking of located routes and of cleared positions
- Photographic record of every marked area, issued as a report
Before you break ground
Planning groundwork on a live site?
We locate and mark underground services before anyone digs, so your contractor works from evidence instead of a guess.
Project background
Rongomai School in Ōtara needed to know what was running under its grounds before work went ahead. On a school site the stakes are higher than the cost of the cable. An unplanned strike takes out the phones, the network or the power in the middle of a teaching day, and the repair happens around children rather than around a work programme.
Cabling For U was asked to locate and mark the underground services across the driveway, the route past the office and the playground, and to leave behind a record the school could keep.
Challenges
A live site with children on it
The work covered the main gate driveway, the paths beside the office and the playground itself, the parts of a school with the most foot traffic. Marking had to be clear enough to act on and placed without disrupting the school day.
Proving the absence of cable, not just its presence
Posts were going into the driveway. The question there was not where the cable ran, but whether anything ran through those positions at all. A clear answer either way had to be defensible later, which meant documenting it rather than reporting it verbally.
Mixed surfaces
Open ground near the gate, paved access paths, concrete beside the buildings and the playground surface each behave differently under a locator, and each had to be marked in a way that survived until the work started.
How Cabling For U delivered
Survey
- Swept all three areas with a cable locating device, supported by a GPR scanner.
- Worked the driveway in sections, near the main gate, through the driveway and at the far end.
- Traced the route from the office through to the playground and across the paved access paths.
Marking and Record
- Marked located cable routes on the ground in paint, following the line of the run.
- Circled the driveway post positions separately to show the areas assessed as clear.
- Photographed every marked area and issued a written report recording what was found in each one.
Project results
Cable was detected and marked along the office route and through the playground, so the school and its contractors can see exactly where those services run before anything breaks ground.
In the driveway, no cable signal was detected within the circled positions around the posts. That is the result the school needed most: a documented, photographed answer that those positions were clear at the time of the survey, rather than an assumption carried into the job.
Knowing where there is no cable turned out to be worth as much as knowing where there is. Both answers went into the same report, and both are now on the record.
Get the same record
Want this documented for your site?
Every locate we do is marked on the ground and photographed into a written report you can hand to your contractor, your insurer or your board.
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