Our safety performance during 2019/20 significantly improved on the previous year. We also experienced our longest period of time (almost 100 days) without having a lost time accident.
Here are a few of our achievements that contribute to our aspiration of Everyone Home Safe Every Day:
The ‘Z stick' idea was first discussed at our Innovation Festival back in July 2019, to help workers capture and record the depth of underground water and sewer pipes across our networks.
While our records, which have been built up over hundreds of years, show the location of these types of assets, they don't always contain information about how far down they're buried. Knowing the depth of the infrastructure beneath our feet is important to help speed up the job, it helps avoid pipes being struck by mistake and can reduce disruption to customers' water supplies.
The Z stick, a colour-coded stick which is now being placed into open excavations, is helping to indicate to our teams how deep underground a pipe is buried.
The blue, green and red coloured bands on the tool categorise the excavation as either shallow, normal or deep. This information is now being measured and recorded from over 2,000 locations as part of a pilot project.
This information will help us despatch teams to jobs, knowing in advance of any specialist equipment they may need to help dig and locate the pipe safely and quickly. It will also enable them to complete the work faster and potentially with less disruption for our customers.
The data is fed back into a computer programme, to help recalibrate a 3D model of the entire 15,000km long network of water pipes. This system will help us save an estimated amount of over £400,000 over three years.
Paddy Garrett our Asset Systems Team Leader, said: "It's more important than ever that we know the depth of our pipes, underneath our pavements and roads because the space is being over crowded with the ever-increasing number of fibres and cables.
“We already know the width and the height, otherwise known as the X and Y position, of our assets, but this will help us measure the Z position, and that's how the Z stick was born.
“Not only will the Z stick help keep our people safe by helping them to avoid accidental strikes to live cables, but it also means they can complete jobs much faster and with minimal disruption because they know where the pipes are located and what equipment is needed to get to them.”
The Z stick is just one of a number of different initiatives we are carrying out to help give our teams a more accurate idea of the water and sewer pipes beneath their feet.
Other projects include development of the country's first common underground map of water, gas and electricity pipes and cables, which we are developing in partnership with Ordnance Survey and the Government's Geospatial Commission.
Watch a video of the Z stick in action: https://youtu.be/ZKqXXGS7RCQ