Underground Utility Networks’ Detection and Damage Prevention
With the increasing number of services offered to the public — such as telecom, electricity, sewerage, and water — there has been a proportional growth in infrastructures supplying these services, creating a mesh of vital underground utility networks (UUN) that is complex and invisible to human eyes (Jeong et al., 2004). In Figure 1, an example of such a situation in the city of Rio de Janeiro is shown.
In complex construction sites and large infrastructure projects, the lack of information about the subsoil may lead to damage of buried infrastructure during excavation and interruption of crucial services, inducing high repair costs and delaying construction (Costello et al., 2007; Lew and Anspach, 2000; Metje et al., 2007). For instance, in 2017, Info-Excavation (2017) reported over five incidents causing damage per business day on average in the province of Québec, Canada, implying an increase of 11% in the number of incidents relative to 2016, which already represented CAD$123 million in socio-economic, direct, and indirect, costs. Nationally, the social-related costs were estimated at almost CAD$1 billion per year (CCGA, 2016).
Figure 1. Example of underground utility networks, Rio de Janeiro (Courtesy of Geovoxel)
With the social, economic, and safety risks taken into consideration, private and public institutions have been uniting their efforts to properly locate and map underground utility networks (U.S. Department of Transportation, 2014; Pouliot et al., 2015; Pouliot and Girard, 2016). With this goal in mind, stakeholders should find out how structures are laid underground before taking decisions about new urban developments or interventions in order to avoid costs and inconvenience to the population and damage to the environment. This emerging field of locating and mapping underground infrastructure has gained visibility and become a new domain of expertise called subsurface utility engineering (SUE). In an assessment by Leuderalbert (1999), for every dollar spent on SUE, $4.62 is saved, demonstrating the economic viability of the practice.