It's all about the ducts

[andrewducker]

I've been wondering why, exactly, Edinburgh's Tram system is taking so ridiculously long to to get finished.  I mean, I'm sure there's incompetence in a variety of places, but I was assuming that something material had occurred to throw work off so badly.

And in a throwaway comment in an article today in The Scotsman it becomes a bit clearer:

Figures set to be presented to the city's tram sub-committee next week show that contractor Carillion moved 40,000 metres of pipes and ducts when it was originally due to be paid £40 million to divert just 27,000m.

According to the council, the amount of utilities work carried out has led to a "significant" improvement in the quality of the city's infrastructure and should help provide faster broadband internet.

While I'm sceptical about the second sentence there, I'm shocked that there was 50% more "stuff" down there than was expected. Was this because the utility companies had no idea what was actually down there? Was there just insufficient due diligence performed when calculating the amount of work to be done? I'd love to know who fucked up on this one - and whether it was actually avoidable.

Comments

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

The short answer is that no, they had no idea how many pipes were there. They know where the water pipes are they put in in the last 30 years but many are far older than that. It's quite likely much of the sewerage network, the drains etc. have been there since the buildings were put up. And they could be 200 years or more old. You most likely have no idea where the. pipes in your flat are and there most likely are no plans still in existence. It is the same with utility pipes. This is why many public building contracts run over budget. It is impossible to set a budget as the exact amount of work required is impossible to know in advance.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

Nope. The Council sells licenses for roadworks, but does not account for those works. There is no central data, no map, no plan. Licensees do not speak to each other, so you could have the same stretch of road dug up by 4 different agencies, none of which knows what the others are doing.

It is as likely as not that the 'extra work' was extremely convenient and saved buckets of trouble/future efforts.

we have no idea what's down there.

Elsewhere, consider that a few centuries ago the Old Town was physically elevated tens of feet, so the ground floors became two underground. People still tried to live there, literally swamped in piss, shit and corpses. Fancy a dig?
It's a shame I'm a useless writer as I've been trying to throw out some horror fiction based on little details like that.

fascinating.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

If you haven't seen it already the film Death Line / Raw Meat may be worth a look.

[nickys.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a civil engineering librarian: finding what utilities run under a particular area usually involves contacting three or four separate sources, getting all the information they hold, combining it, and then digging carefully because it's likely that something unexpected will be there...
So no, probably not avoidable.

[in-thy-bounty.livejournal.com]

Some years ago I worked for a utility company and had access to survey maps for the whole of Scotland which showed the location of gas pipes. While lots of these maps were incredibly accurate (even showing former sites of local historic landmarks long gone that I didn't know about), some were in a different colour which indicated "we're not really sure what we've done here, but it might be something like this". Other times they would go to dig in a supposedly blank area and find they had already laid a pipe 30 years ago.

[natural20.livejournal.com]

They found all sorts of things while digging in Dublin for our trams, far more than they ever expected. And they really screwed a lot up in certain places. Be glad they seem to have not caused massive electricity and telecomms outages in Edi.

[cyprinella]

Outages are a problem for the new metro line they're putting in out in the DC suburbs towards the airport. And since there are a lot of intelligence agency offices out there, the crews don't always know that they've hit something until guys in suits show up.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

They found an WWII-era air-raid shelter they didn't know about when they started digging just outside the railway station in Haymarket. That had to be investigated and then properly filled in to support the weight of the ongoing works to build the tram viaduct sections in the ex-car-park.

I presume that the relocation teams are making better records of precisely where the new stuff is being relaid for future reference.

The reason they had to move all this stuff was because if they just laid the tram tracks over the top of the existing underground services then the whole tram system would grind to a halt the next time a water pipe burst or a gas feed ruptured and they dug up the track area to repair it. Unlike buses trams can't drive around the traffic cones and diggers and men leaning on shovels when this happens.

[andrewducker]

I know that we need to move it - I just hadn't realised how unknown the underneath of Edinburgh was! And I hope that you're right about them keeping better track now.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

They have GPS these days and if all else fails use digital cameras; just take pictures of what's in the hole now before they fill it in again. That's a lot better than the existing pile of hundred-year old hand-drawn sketches and copperplate descriptions of the work that was carried out by half-illiterate Irish navvies.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I'm reading that second sentence as saying that the city hoped to get infrastructure improvement as a freebie extra...