Hello everyone,

Sorry for not dealing with this sooner, we were on leave yesterday and last Friday for the September weekend.  To a certain extent, I agree with Tom on this, that contractors undertaking work should be undertaking utility searches as a matter of course.  However, I’d also say that we were approached by an amateur group a few months ago about a linear feature that they’d identified on aerial photographs in the area to the north of Linlithgow.  We had a look at the aerial photos, and were able to trace the feature to Grangemouth, so were able to tell them that it was likely to represent an underground pipeline.  Having a map of the route of these features would certainly make identification quicker, but the plans included in the INEOS brochure aren’t particularly detailed, especially for the Grangemouth – Bowling pipeline.  Could you therefore ask if they’ve got shapefiles for these routes – I’m happy enough to put them in our system as potential constraints to be avoided, mainly because they’ll represent linear zones of destruction where there’d be little chance of survival anyway, but I don’t really want to spend a load of time digitising the various routes if this is simply replicating work that they’ve done already.

Regards,

Martin