The official estimate is that every seven seconds somebody digs a hole in the UK — and that 60,000 times a year they end up wishing they had dug it somewhere else.
For that is how many times water mains, gas pipes and other buried assets are hit by utility companies and other excavators. To reduce those mishaps and the disruption they cause, the first proper map of what lies beneath our feet, from Victorian sewers to fibre optics, is being created.
The £35 million project expects to chart about 2.5 million miles of pipes and cables — enough to stretch to the moon and back five times. A first draft of the digital chart has been completed for the three countries it will cover: