SA Water chooses C.R. Kennedy for utility locators

By on 3 December, 2021

Image courtesy C.R. Kennedy Survey

SA Water has awarded a contract to C.R. Kennedy Survey for the supply and maintenance of 38 advanced utility locating systems.

A recent review had identified a need to upgrade a range of underground locating equipment used by SA Water’s Customer Field Services teams, to make sure it continues to meet relevant industry standards.

The teams operate from numerous depots across regional South Australia, and are responsible for ensuring the safe and efficient operation, maintenance and repairs of water assets, such as underground pipelines and service pipes.

SA Water has selected the vLoc3 Pro advanced utility locator by Vivax-Metrotech to help the field crews carry out their utility detection work, in full compliance with current requirements recommended by Dial-Before-You-Dig (DBYD) and the National Utility Locating Association (NULCA).

“As a provider of essential water services to South Australians, it’s important we equip our maintenance crews with tools and knowledge to enable them to work safely and efficiently,” said Warwick Crawford, SA Water Operation Improvement Lead

“The support given by a supplier is also key, which we believe we have found in C.R. Kennedy, who are a national supplier of survey equipment, with offices and repair facilities nation-wide, including Adelaide.”

The Vivax-Metrotech units have two sets of 3D antennas using three antennas per set, which are used to analyse the quality of the signal and enable new views of the locate environment.

New visualisation modes, in full colour, such as the Transverse Graph showing both a graph of peak and null simultaneously, provide immediate measurement of signal distortion. Vector Locate shows orientation, line position, and distance relative to the locator in 3D. The system is capable of logging results and reporting all details via its cloud-based mobile application VMMAP.

“Being part of the field maintenance crew, we value the investments our organisation makes in new technology. The new visualisation techniques offered by the vLoc3 utility locator are supported by a colour screen enabling the user to interpret the quality of the signal via red, blue or green colour coding,” added Mark Evans, SA Water District Leader.

“The vLoc3’s ability to show us onscreen that there is distortion, has assisted in providing our operators an effective monitoring tool – simple colour coding shows the operator that they have little or no distortion, medium distortion or heavy distortion whilst in the standard locate screen.”

“This contract award reaffirms C.R. Kennedy’s technology leadership in providing advanced underground detection systems for safety, management and automation of underground detection and mapping tasks,” said Maurice Borer, C.R. Kennedy’s National Product Manager for Detection and Asset Mapping/GIS Systems.

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