THE tangled mess of eight million miles of pipes and cables under the streets of Britain will be mapped within a decade, scientists promised yesterday.

Workers dig holes in roads four million times each year to repair or replace pipes and wires. It is estimated that one third of these works start in the wrong place because records are inaccurate or incomplete.

Moreover, there is, on average, one death and scores of serious injuries each year because workers hack into cables and pipes that they did not realise were there.

Scientists at the universities of Leeds and Nottingham have been given £2.2 million to develop a handheld screen that will show road diggers every pipe, cable and underground obstacle beneath their feet.

The information will be gathered using ground-reading radar combined with satellite and ground-based positioning technologies.

The scientists will also scour the archives of utilities, cable communications companies and local authorities for existing records.

Digging holes in roads for pipes and cables costs £1 billion annually and a further £4 billion through indirect costs caused by delays and inconvenience.

The team believes that the device could save the nation billions of pounds. However, even a 0.1 per cent reduction in hole-digging would save several million pounds a year.

Tony Cohn, of Leeds University, said: “There are enough pipes and cables buried under our streets to stretch to the Moon and back ten times, but we don’t know where many of them are.

“Many of the country’s pipes were laid in the 19th and early-20th century. Even where there are records, many are now very inaccurate. Our aim is to create the technology to enable the construction of a dynamic map of all the UK’s underground assets.”

He added that the three- dimentional map would be accurate to within two inches and that the database would cover most areas of the country within a decade.

Mike Farrimond, the director of UK Water Industry Research, who is heading the four-year project, said: “When utilities and highways authorities are digging in the streets they often find what they don’t expect to find.

“Conversely, they often don’t find what they do expect to find. We don’t have a detailed 3D map of what’s in the street. If we had, they would be a lot more effective in finding and repairing leaks.”

The Department for Trade and Industry is providing £900,000 of the project’s funding, and industry has guaranteed £1.3 million more.

OUT OF SIGHT

The network of eight million miles of cables and pipes includes:

171,000 miles of gas pipes

220,000 miles of sewers

246,000 miles of water mains

300,000 miles of electricity lines

1.2m miles of telephone and cable television wires

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