Every year the US magazine Underground Focus produces a DVD - Digging Dangers - to highlight the often spectacularly disastrous consequences of excavating without full information on all buried infrastructure. The latest edition contains dramatic and disturbing footage.
The latest edition, Digging Dangers 24, is billed as “the best introduction to the digging dangers involved in the underground utility industry we’ve ever produced [and] an absolute must-have for everyone in our industry.”
You can watch the lastest edition above, It’s even more graphic and confronting than Digging Dangers 23, which we reviewed last year. It contains video footage of a city building exploding while cars wait at the nearby intersection, and recorded calls to 911 emergency operators, including one from a woman who says: “The house across my street just blew up!”
As the voice over concludes: “Damage prevention challenges have never been greater than they are today. The worst excavation disasters are those that could easily have been prevented. With one stroke of the clock lives can be altered for ever.”
Digging Dangers 24 is due for release shortly and can be pre-ordered . It covers third party excavation projects and, according to Underground Focus, discusses “where these third-party excavation projects went wrong, giving those of us in the industry an opportunity to apply lessons learned before we make the same mistakes.”
In this Infrastructure protection column last year we reviewed the 2013 edition, Digging Dangers 23. You can watch DD23 on YouTube, where you will also find several earlier editions.
Digging Dangers 23 identified the seven deadly sins of digging (preoccupation, detachment, spite, ambiguity, egoism, ignorance and negligence). It illustrated these ‘sins of commission’ and ‘sins of omission’ with graphic footage of burning houses and eyewitness accounts.
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