A national demonstration project to showcase sustainable transport has been hit by the discovery that a gas main is located closer to the surface than expected. T
he depth of the 100-year-old gas main was only revealed once work got under way on ~Darlington Borough Council~'s ‘pedestrian heart’ project to pedestrianise the town centre. Local traders greeted the council’s announcement that the scheme could be delayed while the feeder pipe – which would impact on the project’s foundation work – is diverted, with anger.
Darlington said it would work closely with United Utilities to reroute the gas main, a project which would take ‘several weeks to complete’. But contractor Birse would continue work on unaffected parts of the scheme, to create a large new pedestrian space along five streets using Yorkshire granite.
The problems which have hit the scheme are likely to increase pressure on the Department for Transport to introduce firmer guidelines for utility companies on keeping more detailed information on buried apparatus.
Louise Allen, strategic project development officer for the Darlington scheme, said: ‘We carried out an initial survey before starting the works and found the gas pipe, so we were well aware of it. But, as far as I know, there is no way we can be certain how deep the pipe goes until we actually start to dig.’ She added that the council was continuing to work with its contractor, with the aim of getting the project completed by the original deadline of March 2007.
The different elements of the pedestrianisation scheme could be rescheduled to achieve this. Darlington’s is not the first major streetscene project to be affected by uncertainty over the location and ownership of utilities. An independent review into Oxfordshire’s high-profile repaving scheme for the shopping street of Cornmarket found that unreliable utilities records meant weeks were spent getting each utility company to inspect each cable – and some could not be identified by anybody (Surveyor, 24 February 2005).
The ~Institution of Civil Engineers~ and other organisations also established a geospatial engineering board, called the buried services working group, to tackle the problem. Last year, the group called for clearer code of practice guidance on the need to record the position of all buried apparatus – in three dimensions, rather than just two. There were plans to clarify the existing code of practice advice to tackle the issue, according to a spokesman for the DfT.
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