In the U.K. alone, underground construction accidents cost billions of dollars every year.
RodRadar
Underground construction accidents remain a massive problem in older countries
In Italy, excavation activities are part of one of the most complex infrastructural contexts in Europe, where water, electricity, gas, sewer, and telecommunications networks extend for hundreds of thousands of kilometers — with 425 thousand kilometers of aqueducts and over 40 thousand of gas pipelines. In Lombardy, for example, on the occasion of Expo Milano 2015, over 230,000 square metres of underground infrastructure were mapped and significant discrepancies were found in the historical registers, with thousands of metres of unsurveyed infrastructure and an average geolocation error of 30 percent, which in some cases reached up to 100 percent.
Every year, around 100,000 accidents involving damage to underground public utility infrastructure are recorded in Germany, with excavation machinery responsible for almost 80 percent of these impacts. According to BG Etem, insurance companies in Germany pay out around 500 million euros per year for excavation-related damage. In the U.K., on the other hand, an estimated 60,000 underground infrastructure accidents cost the local economy around £2.4 billion a year. In such a complex scenario, also characterized by increasing urbanization, damage to infrastructure could generate consequences ranging from simple local interruptions to major accidents, with significant economic impacts: from the repair of pipelines and the restoration of the road surface, to the interruption of essential services, passing from the downtime of projects to inconvenience for citizens and businesses. In addition to these effects, there are environmental and social effects, due to losses of natural resources, gas leaks or damage to urban plants, which compromise safety and quality of life in cities.
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