RIP this guys job - For anyone working near St Kilda Rd with no phone/internet
Posted Mar 7, 2016, 3:47 AM UTC
20590
Don't they teach you to dial before you dig at tractor shovel school?
49
in fairness - i've done 1100, got full site histories, as built plans from the previous owners, done line location, asked all the people who look after site services what was under my site...
found a 415v power cable 3m down - site sparkie said "oh, was wondering where that board was getting power from!"
lesson: no amount of due diligence will replace previous laziness.
89
Do they paint the conduit paths when you call 1100 or is that more of a utilities only sorta thing?
11
no generally 1100 gives you two things:
- any "site plans" they have on file, generally pretty shitty if they have them at all
- the public plans which show where things like water mains/underground power enter the property, normally you will have a water main coming in from the street into a blank box which is the property you inquired about
(my experience with 1100 is limited but generally you learn sweet FA from them)
line location is where you mark up the ground using radars/other cool tech to physically find it in the ground - really interesting work actually. This is the thing that really matters as you'll find things like underground gas lines on a residential property that some dude laid himself in 1968 without council permission
21
Can confirm.
Plans from 1100 are severely lax and only show what utility companies have bothered to enter into a database.
Plus, some groups (Telstra) want you to pay money before they give you any data on such things.
I've heard that in some parts of Melbourne - you still get the old localized water utility pipelines - from the pre water board's era.
12
Interesting stuff. Cheers.
3
I was doing a job years ago and needed to find the stormwater, the place was only a couple of years old so I went down to the council and they gave me a photocopy. I dug half a dozen holes and hit nothing but virgin dirt, in the finish I gave up and discharged it to a laneway at the rear, the inspector gave me the all clear to do it when he saw the open holes I'd dug and checked them against the alleged stormwater layout. We never did find out where they were.
2
How do you get this information? We had some people do some digging on our site a while back and they accidentally dug up the internet line and cut it. We got it fixed pretty quick but it was still a disruption to the business. If we are getting any work done in future it would be useful to have the plan showing where all the power/telephone lines come in.
2
Dial Before You Dig (1100.com.au) only provide you with plans detailing utilities on public land, they don't provide any accurate details as soon as the utility enters private property. Sometimes sites have their own service layout plans if it was for example, a council building, however if you are doing some excavations, there are companies that perform pipe and cable locating - I am a service locator myself :)
4
That's quite a fair way down for an LV cable! However 3m is really pushing the limitations of current radio detection instruments, I wouldn't be confident providing depth readings on anything deeper than 2m. Not hating on whoever did your service locating but a good chat to the site sparkie/plumber with the service locator helps a lot in finding out what they know/don't know because we're there to fill in the gaps!
2
Listen to this person. Gov't agencies and big companies do not know or care where their shit is buried until there is a problem.
1
It takes time and people are lazy, I guess
4
Our 1100 report for a site in Prahran shows the water main connection 80m away diagonally from where it connects on the other side of the property. Shows that there is a fibre line running where the power actually goes, and that we are hooked up to power on the back of the block not the front...
South East Water parroted the same line to us about the water main, only to find that it comes in off the front and has four snapped stop valves inline :S
2
That probably isn't his job.
1
This happened over ten years ago out on Melbourne's fringe in Wallan.
The operator of the earthmover abandoned his machinery and legged it...
I guess the penalty is worth more than an excavator!
25
Client I'm at currently has people trying to put a dollar value on what this outage will cost. Apparently it's a pretty major outage as well. So that figure (Us IT guys reckon the company is worth about $150k/day nation wide in revenue.) a few times over means that guys is probs LONG gone, aha.
12
If he did Dial before you dig, then he is safe from having to pay. He did what he could.
12
They're going to get money out of someone. Doubt they care who.
8
The way Dial before you Dig ends up working, is they ask all the players if they have any services in and around where you are asking. (Under the road you need to specifically ask for that).
So if the providers who have services under there don't say something, then they are the ones at fault.
14
Except all DBYD plans contain conditions, most likely PL insurance will pay if you got the plans but it doesn't absolve you of responsibility.
2
I once had a few senior management guys standing behind me, chewing their nails, at 3 in the morning while I was trying to locate a missing comma in 15,000+ lines of firewall config (not my fault) while drunk as a skunk and chain-smoking, because neither the on-call guy nor the backup felt like coming in.
Nothing like "don't want to stress you but if this doesn't work by the time the exchange opens, we lose about a million (Swiss Francs) every 6 minutes" to make you wish you'd not ended up in IT ops...
11
Well how did it go? Defused? I imagine it's similar to being in bomb squad.
3
This was a really fucked up, weird contract job that I should probably turn into a book sometime.
It was my first contractor position, and I was basically left holding the fort after most of the regional firewall team of a big international investment bank up and quit (all the better, since they used to hold farting competitions in a closed small office). There was this one season we called "the winter of our discontent" because it involved working our nuts off, earning a lot of money, and spending most of it on alcohol.
The longest day I ever had was about 86 hours, involving a network guy who showed up with a shopping bag full of bananas and red bull (he went home in tears about 60 hours in), two UNIX admins in aloha shirts smoking at their desks in an open plan office (and the phrase "oops", which you should never see in internal IRC during a 5,000 user migration after 5 hours of silence), project managers kicking me awake when I fell asleep under my desk, The Page With The Pig, a baseball bat named "Molly", and two guys welcoming me with a fat spliff when I walked out into the blinding sunshine, 3 hours before the rollback date.
The episode I referred to in my previous post came after I'd been out drinking way too much, and was trying to figure out which of my 4 keyholes was the right one when I got a phone call with someone shouting at me GET THE FUCK DOWN HERE NOW at 2-3 a.m. sometime. I had this crazy Vietnamese cab driver racing me through Zurich doing about 90 in the city, and when I got there, someone just grabbed me and dragged me into a meeting room with the CIO, chief of staff, and about 15 other muckity-mucks looking panicky. When I got in there, reeking of booze, chief of staff screams at me "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE GET TO YOUR OFFICE". Oh dear.
I got in there, and the aforementioned crowd of managers gathered behind me for some bizarre reason, it was totally surreal. One of the UNIX guys came in, got this panicky look on his face, ran out, came back with a cup of coffee, a cup full of cigarettes, and a cup of water to use as an ashtray, mumbled something like "you might need these" and fled. I fixed it sometime before pre-trading started, and vaguely remember mumbling random shit to myself as one of the mid-level management types drove me home.
I made a shit ton of money on that job, worked with some insanely smart people, and I am never ever ever working ops again. No Nope fuck that never.
12
What happened!! So interesting.
3
See other post. Lots of alcohol and badness and there's a reason why you should pay good IT guys lots of money and trust them.
1
If a company suffers $150k a day due to outages, they are negligent in not having diverse providers, entry points etc.
7
Implying that kind of infrastructure is available in that location.
7
At that location there is. Unless there are serious site restrictions there should be at least 2 fibre providers (if AAPT are there T&O are likely there as well). Failing that BigAir can provide gig wireless to most Melbourne areas. Diverse carriers is almost always available it's just most people either inflate impact or were gambling and get caught out.
3
If that's the case, poor choice to locate themselves in a building without redundant and diverse services.
It's usually non the case enough - enough money can often get you what you need.
1†
By location, you probably don't mean Wallan (as per my OP) but just in case:
My available infrastructure in times of outage included a 7km tractor ride, often in the rain to the nearest payphone (cellular shadow in that whole area at the time) - the highest tier dispute lodged with the TIO before they refer a matter to court - satellite phones by air-courier from as far afield as Brisbane - on-site linesmen "donating" kilometres of 2nd hand cabling so I could do some of the work myself, etc, etc.
1
Won't insurance cover this? Serious q.
2
Assuming they themselves are not at fault, I guess so.
1
I don't believe a guy's life should be destroyed over a mistake, even if he was a bit negligent. This is also coming from someone in Northcote, where fibre is a fucking dream.
2
Serious question from an ex telco engineer.
I saw these big numbers kicked around all the time when calculating the cost of an outage.
When you value the impact of an outage such as this at 150k per day how do you justify not having fully diverse paths?
This is a force majure event meaning most telcos won't give you rebates or even count it against their uptime sla. So not only is the business unlikely to get rebates they certainly are not entitled to any compensation.
One exception is if they have diverse paths but they weren't as diverse as advertised (which does happen as well).
2
I don't see how someone digging up cables is a force majure event. This could have easily been prevented if procedures had of been followed (not blaming anyone in particular here).
Weather or no insurance will cover this is entirely different and probably completely dependant on your policy (I don't imagine many insurance companies being keen to offer coverage for some as fragile as telecommunications in Australia).
1
From the telco standpoint as long as they responded appropriately to any dial before you dig enquiry the actions of the construction crew are out of their hands. They can't have field engineers on site at every construction.
We can argue semantics but I know from experiences an act like this would be classified force majure and not subject to SLA.
1
My SO accidentally cut a Telstra internet line last year while working. Cut the cable (so Foxtel and internet I believe...) to a town of about 1200 people. Think it was down overnight.
Telstra sent him a bill for 1200 for the accident.
1
That cable looks awfully close to the surface, aren't fibre cables supposed to be sunk 1.2m below the surface? I have heard that dodgy contractors installed them at 60cm when they couldn't be bothered digging trenches in hard ground.
16
Exactly what I though. Where they were digging it would have been closer to 3ft because of a large raised garden bed/area. Bu from the footpath it's barely 20cm.
5
Hmmm, it looks like 100mm conduit. Likely the ones the go from comms pit to comms pit. The top of the pit is level with footpath, those things are only about 700mm deep. They can't really go much lower than 600mm under the ground.
3
I don't think it's fibre given the size of the cables, also only really old fibre is black most fibre is bright blue, nbn is green and optus is grey oh and iirc AAPT is pink. There are others but no one uses black.
2
Hard to blame him considering it looks like you could hit those cables with just a shovel on the first attempt. Simply looks like whoever put the cable in to begin with did a dodgy as hell job.
11
Yeah the guys at city circle are pretty good/ experienced don't think they would have been very negligent.
4
1100 Dial Before You Dig
7
1800-She'll Be Right Mate
25
13-fuck it, it's smoko
9
Shit happens. His job isn't going anywhere, unless his employer doesn't have insurance causing the employer go to bust - but he would still get paid first.
7
Yeah, nah, unless they've already excavated a few layers already, there is no way that conduit was deep enough. Mind you, the photo could be deceiving.
Hope the HMO is a union member and isn't unfairly scapegoated.
3
you can see the lane at the back of the photo, so i would guess that is the level of the street.
2
Dial before you dig doesn't always mean the location or depth is accurate. But yeah to cover your arse dial before you dig...
3
Nah, he'll be alright. We had a contractor once dug through asphalt only to hit our internal fibre. The entire corporation network went down as the fibre went straight to the hub.
2
That's why you dial before you dig.
2
Weird, I'm a couple of doors down with no issues.
1
Looks like they didn't even have the bright orange ribbon I've seen put about a foot above shallow cables to warn diggers, unless it's faded to the white thing you can barely see in that pic near the conduit/pipe.
1
That bright orange plastic ribbon is for power, there are no markers for communications cables, dial before you dig may not have even helped them because Telstra's records regarding the location of their own network pipes is piss poor at best.
2
It seems like a pretty simple and extremely economical thing to do for laying any cable that might get dug up. Interesting to see it isn't as standard as I thought.
1
it is that thing.
it is white with black writing to start with though.
1
Where I used to work we had some contractors that had dug into the ground for some reason. There was a thick power cable underground which powered the factory.
The power company detected fluctuations and were able to pinpoint where it was occurring within the cable. Dug it up again to find it had been cut into somehow and was sparking or leaking power at least. 10,000 volts and when the contractors were asked about it, apparently they were picking it up and moving it around. Very lucky they didn't get zapped.
1
Almost def not the operators fault. Contractor and spotter should be revealing them. The operator just pulls the sticks. Unless he was digging where he shouldn't have been.
1
Well at least it wasn't the gas transmission line again. Would have been much worse if that ruptured.
1
Services get hit everyday. As builting is atrocious it causes millions of damage.
0
daReelMVP.exe
-2†
Saw the demo works at 499 St. Kilda Rd on my way to work this morning. A few hours later and my phones are dead. ISP advised there's an active alarm for downed link but no news as to why. Went for a stroll up to the demo site and found this. Fiber team is on site atm.
I'd say down till at least early AM tomorrow. Good chance to catch up on some doco.
Looks like Union is on site now, as well as AAPT, Connect Comms, ELS and building managers. Overheard them and sounds like they're just gonna rejoin the bundles for now. Must have been enough slack at either end for it to not fuck everything.
Strangely it looks like it's barely 20cm under the footpath. Where they were digging though it would have been ~3ft as there was a raised garden bed.
[deleted]
Do you work in the construction industry? Or have you learnt all about the unions from the herald sun..
Or you listened to any domestic boss like all of my apprentice friends. "Union is good for nothing they just want your money"
[deleted]
Exactly. There was a crowd of a half-dozen of the contract demo guys hovering around him last I saw.
It'll be something real shitty too. Like maybe they did 1100 but the conduit was supposed to be another 100mm down so that makes it not their fault.
Why are you getting angry and not just explaining if people have no idea?
The union won't defend you for being an idiot and digging up comms. That's what business insurance is for.
[deleted]