Buried armoured cables

[balcock]

Hi,

Yesterday I started replacing my existing garden fence and whilst boring the holes for the posts I hit what appears to be an armoured telecoms cable.

How deep should this have been buried, and do building regulations state how far from the boundary line of a property this should be?

There is a footpath approximately 1m wide that runs down the side of my back garden and the back of other peoples back gardens for access.
The cable seems to run the length of the footpath, parallel and dangerously close to my boundary line. I'm also amazed that some of the pre-existing posts didn't hit it since it appears to run straight at them. I guess they weren't quite two foot down.

My first seven post holes missed this cable altogether, the 8th hit it and damaged it slightly, the 9th and 10th also hit it (but we dug those out by hand). The cable depth in those holes was 22 inches, 19 inches and 24 inches respectively.

These houses were built in '78 in the good old days before "regulations" had been invented

Cheers,
Barry.

 

[IJWS15]

There is no regulation depth for telecoms cables. Recwent court cases indicate that you should expect to find them at around 150mm in certain circumstances.

How can you be sure it is a telecoms cable? And if you have damaged it it might get expensive.

 

[balcock]

The outer coating and the steel wire armor had been mangled enough to expose some small gauge wires individually insulated. Far too small to carry any significant current. There would also be no good reason for power cables to be routed that way. Adding everything up it seemed probable it was telecoms.

After some considerable chasing I had BT engineer round this afternoon who confirmed it was one of their cables (one of two they have burried there) but he agreed it was an odd place to run the cable. There was some deliberation over whether they would dig a new trench and run ducting and a new cable down the footpath. They called me back again later in the afternoon to say they changed their mind and would just repair the cable in situe.

They also said that since the cable shouldn't be there (I assume that meant so close to the boundary) and that it wouldn't cost me anything. I'll wait until its over with before I take a sigh of relief.

My main concern at the moment is if they're not going to shift the cable my new posts will be getting concreted in on top of it. I hope for their sake they won't need access to it in future.

 

[IJWS15]

Lucky - cost of repair will be a couple of hndred £££.

We have a claim running for damage to a cable that was 3" down in a public footpath ! ! !

BT argue that we should have expected it to be there and case law supports them.

 

[TicklyT]

At least BT seem to have done a reasonable job of burying the cable, even if it isn't quite where they expected it to be.

In some streets, it's not unusual to see green cable TV ducts poking through the tarmac, and bare cables laid on top of flower beds in gardens.

Cables often get installed fairly early in the construction of new developments, when roadways and footpaths are not well defined on the ground, so drawings etc. only show where they should be, not where they are.