Utility Strikes: What BYDA Told the WHS Show, and How We Dig

At the Workplace Health & Safety Show at ICC Sydney on 21 October 2026, I sat in on Riley Bryn's session at the High Risk Safety Summit. Riley is National Head of Safety Standards and Assurance at Before You Dig Australia (BYDA), and his talk, "The devastating impact of utility damage in Australia (and how to avoid it)", is one I'd want every operator, plumber and builder to hear.

The cost of a strike

• More than 15,000 reported strikes a year on gas, water, telco and power networks: one every 35 minutes, and many more that never get reported.
• $4.6 billion a year to the Australian economy. Direct repairs are about $138 million. The rest is outages, project delays, lost trade and environmental damage, roughly 32 times the repair bill.
• Lives. Riley's figures were more than 150 people killed since 2001 after contact with powerlines or underground cables, with powerline contact behind about 90% of electrical deaths. A powerline is hit somewhere in Australia every day, often by tippers, cranes and hiabs, over-height loads and farm machinery.

The cost figures come from BYDA's Economic Assessment of Utility Strikes in Australia.

What's down there

Riley put the networks side by side: over 145,000 km of water mains, around 88,000 km of gas distribution plus 42,000 km of high-pressure transmission, over 400,000 km of fibre and more than 850,000 km of power network. They don't all run straight, they don't all sit at the depth shown on the plan, and plenty of private and old services aren't on any plan at all.

Where BYDA came from

It started in 1984 at Bibra Lake in Western Australia, when a bulldozer punctured a high-pressure gas pipeline. The operator walked away, but the damage led the utilities to set up the Perth One Call System. By the 1990s every state had its own service, and in 2022 they merged into one national organisation, Before You Dig Australia. In 2024 BYDA added Look Up and Live for overhead powerlines. The goal is zero harm, zero damage and zero disruption.

The 5 Ps, and how we do them

BYDA's 5 Ps of safe excavation were the backbone of the talk. Here's each one, and how it looks on our jobs.

• Plan. Lodge a free BYDA enquiry at least one business day before work starts. We don't put a bucket in the ground without current plans on site. Our BYDA guide covers what to do with them.
• Prepare. Read every response, call the asset owner when something isn't clear, look for clues on site such as pit lids, marker posts and meters, and get a skilled locator in before potholing.
• Pothole. Physically sight the service by hand digging or vacuum excavation, using the method the asset owner allows. A plan is QL-D information. A service you've exposed and seen is QL-A.
• Protect. Once a service is exposed, support it, mark it, tell everyone on site, and set up barriers and exclusion zones. Riley was clear that protecting exposed services is the excavator operator's job.
• Proceed. Only dig once the first four are done.

The law in one line

Under the WHS Regulations (regulation 304 in NSW and the model laws), the person with management or control of the workplace must take all reasonable steps to get current underground services information for the dig area and the areas next to it before excavation starts, and pass it on to whoever does the work. A BYDA enquiry is how most of us meet that.

It isn't always excavation

Not every strike comes from a digger. Sign posts, real estate boards and fence posts go through services too, and a burst main can shut a major road. Riley's example was Parramatta Road at Homebush under water. If it goes in the ground, lodge an enquiry.

The tools worth having on your phone

• The BYDA app. Lodge enquiries, track responses and view plans on site, even offline once they've arrived.
• Look Up and Live. A free map of overhead powerlines with voltages, owners and exclusion zone guidance. For tipper, hiab and truck work this matters as much as what's underground. Coverage is still limited in WA, the NT and Tasmania.
• The BYDA Digital Utility Portal. A pilot running in Greater Sydney, Brisbane and WA that puts all available services on one GIS map, coloured to AS 5488 and downloadable. It's for planning and design, and it doesn't replace the enquiry.

All the links are in the Free tools section of our BYDA guide.

Talking with Riley

After the session I caught up with Riley and showed him what we've built on this site: our BYDA guide and the Earth Block, which shows how services sit in the ground and why the quality of the information matters before you dig.

Book a free session

BYDA's damage prevention officers run free awareness and plan reading sessions, online or face to face. If you run a crew that digs, whether that's plumbing, civil, building, landscaping or fencing, I'd recommend booking one: book a free BYDA session.

Thanks to Riley and the BYDA team for a session that anyone who digs should see.