Reading Plans

Before You Dig Australia offers a free service whereby you can order plans for your work area which are then provided to you free of charge by the Asset Owners that are members of the BYDA service in your work area.

What a wonderful service, but there are a couple of pit falls that you need to be aware of. Firstly, if there are assets in the ground from an organisation that is not registered with nor a member of BYDA, you will not receive any plans for that asset, but a bigger issue is that you will not be made aware of this situation and there may be no visual clues available that could help you identify an un-registered asset.

Secondly, plans only indicate the services that are on public property, in other words, any service that is on private property is not shown. This is left up to the skills of the locator to find and mark all services on private property.

And finally, you MUST be aware that plans are indicative only. This means that they will give you an indication of the presence of the asset, BUT they cannot be relied upon to be accurate. Most of the Asset Owners are now quoting that their plans are drawn at Quality Level D according to AS5488. And a reminder that QL-D states:

The information may be compiled from existing records, cursory site inspection or anecdotal evidence. There is no requirement for a spatial tolerance, only a general indication of location.

Whilst there is other useful information that you receive from the Asset Owner through the BYDA process, the main items we are looking for (regarding Plan Reading) are the Utility Plans themselves and the accompanying legend.

Let’s start with the Legend. No, I’m not talking about myself (I know bad joke). The Legend is the key to unlocking the information that is provided in the Utility Plan. A legend is a graphic depiction of a physical item and is not intended to be a “photographic” reproduction of the item, but rather a “Symbol” that represents the item.

Often the Asset Owner will use different colours to represent different assets, the one that readily springs to mind is from the gas companies who use various colours to represent the different pressures their networks operate at. If you use hard copy printed plans, it is important to ensure that they are printed, along with the legend, in colour. It is also worthwhile having the plan printed in A3 size. This facilitates the reading of the plan, any smaller can create difficulty deciphering smaller print.

Another handy tip that I found useful while learning, was to have the plans and the legend on site and actually identify the physical items while reading the plan.

This reinforced the learnings and made the journey that much quicker.

I am sure that as long as you have the legend, you will be able to read any Asset Owners plan for any jurisdiction. It is just a matter of practice and experience. GOOD LUCK.

Available the beginning of April, Locating Unlimited will have available an on-line Asset Plan Reading course, that will fast track the learning process. Keep an eye here -