Crafting a technological, regulatory, and contractual strategy for one of Israel’s major national infrastructure contractors, to minimize and mitigate risks posed by underground utilities
The challenge: Unknown and poorly documented buried utilities and archeological sites create both physical and financial risks, plaguing major infrastructure projects throughout Israel. Infrastructure companies employ multiple methods to minimize these risks, including both geophysical surveys and painstaking coordination of proposed work sites with multiple agencies and stakeholders. Even so, the rate of encountering unknown utilities is still unacceptably high. TASC was asked to recommend the best technological method for underground utility mapping to mitigate these risks.
Based on our understanding of the limits of available discovery and mapping technologies for underground utilities, we found that simply adopting different tech would not yield a substantial change in outcome for our customer. Therefore, our multidisciplinary team created a strategy well beyond the original scope of the project, crafted not only to diversify and modernize the types of systems to be used for underground mapping in Israel, but also to fundamentally change the way mapping subcontractors are incentivized to deliver more accurate and refined end products and to adopt newer, cutting-edge systems as the technological landscape progresses, all while completing their tasks faster, and streamlining the planning and construction phases of major infrastructure projects.
Currently, Israel’s Ministry of Transportation is considering implementing some of TASC’s recommendations stemming from this project at the national level, to better support large scale, national projects.
