Symbols, symbols everywhere… what they mean no one gives a care… until now, They are the fleeting multi-coloured maps that chart the lay of the land beneath our feet. They tell those who dig up our roads where exactly the pipes and cables run, and, just as importantly, at what depth. Here we decode readers’ road squiggle finds. Red, for example, is the colour of electricity. Blue denotes water while yellow means gas, green means CCTV or cable firm networks and white, telecommunications (or general messages to contractors carrying out works).
The numbers between the lines are used spell out the distance from the kerb of a particular pipe or a cable or – if a D is used – its depth. “This is an electric sub-station that switches high-voltage cables (11,000 volts or above) to a lower voltage that can supply small industrial and domestic properties. “The high voltage enters on the right hand side of the apparatus and exits on the left at a lower voltage.
The red cables (and paint) is the high voltage and the green is the low/medium voltage,” says Robinson. “The numbers must relate to a schematic numbering plan of some sort to distribution identification.” And as this network of pipes and cables becomes ever more congested, so specialist “locating companies” are increasingly the ones mapping out this subterranean world as to help out the electricians and other workers to make there life simpler, so don’t feel bad if you don’t know what the symbols mean, specialists have to be called in to make sense of it for anyone