Excavation and Site Prep Editing and Proofreading Services

The drawings show the gas main running down the east side of the road. The gas main is on the west side. Somebody surveyed it in 1974, somebody else diverted it in 1991, and the record of the diversion went into a filing cabinet in an office that closed. A machine driver is about to find out, and everything that stands between that moment and a serious incident is a permit written by somebody in an office.

We edit what groundworks and excavation contractors produce — permit to dig documentation and its conditions, service search and utility record documentation, scanning and location survey records, safe digging method statements, trial hole and slit trench procedures, excavation support and trench safety documentation, ground conditions and unexpected findings procedures, spoil handling and material classification documentation, dewatering and discharge documentation, reinstatement specifications, and site clearance and setting out records. Our editors work on the permit that authorises somebody to break ground.

The permit to dig is where buried services are either respected or discovered, and its failure is treating utility records as a map. Drawings show where services were recorded, not where they are, and a permit reproducing them without saying so has transferred false confidence to a machine driver. We work through these so the permit states the age and source of every record used, since a 1974 statutory record and a scan taken this morning are not the same evidence and the difference should be visible on the permit; so the scanning results are recorded with the date, the equipment, the operator and what was actually detected, given that a scan more than a few days old has to be repeated and frequently is not; so the permitted method is stated by zone rather than for the excavation as a whole — hand dig within a stated distance either side of every marked service, machine dig elsewhere — because a blanket instruction to dig carefully is not a method; so the unexpected findings rule is written as an instruction with a name and a number, as this is the moment that decides the outcome; so services that could not be located, or that the records suggest should be there and were not found, are listed explicitly as unresolved; and so the permit has a duration and a re-issue trigger. Permits written this way stop the machine before the main.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including permits, survey records and site information. We are editors rather than utility, safety or engineering specialists, and we offer no view on service locations, methods or safe digging practice. What we can do is make the permit say what is known and what is not.