A trench on a Dubai site. The bucket comes up short, and then something happens that everyone recognises without being told what it was.
A bang. A flash. A smell of gas. Sometimes nothing dramatic at all, just a scrape and a nick in a sheath that somebody notices twenty minutes later.
When an excavator strikes a buried service in Dubai, the next sixty seconds matter more than everything that follows. What comes after is reporting, cost and permits, and all of it is survivable.
What follows is a procedure, not an article. Read it in order.
The first sixty seconds
Stop, and treat the machine and the ground as live
Stop all work. Not just this machine, everything in the excavation.
Assume the service is live and the ground is energised. Electricity leaving a damaged cable spreads outward through the soil and the voltage falls with distance, so two points on the ground a stride apart can sit at different voltages.
That is step potential, and it is what injures people walking toward a machine to see what happened. Touch potential is the same effect between the machine and the ground. Nothing about the surface tells you it is happening.
The operator stays in the cab
If the machine is in contact with the service, or might be, the operator stays where he is.
Inside the cab he is at one potential and bridging nothing. The danger begins the moment a person touches the machine and the ground at the same time.
So he touches nothing metallic that also touches the ground, does not climb down, and waits.
If he is forced to leave
Only for fire or immediate danger to life.
He jumps clear of the machine and lands with both feet together, without touching the machine and the ground at the same instant. Not stepping down. Jumping.
Then he moves away with his feet together, shuffling or hopping in small movements, keeping both feet in contact with each other. Never a normal stride, because a stride is exactly what bridges two different voltages.
Nobody approaches the machine
Set an exclusion zone and keep everyone outside it until the asset owner confirms the service is dead.
There is no published UAE exclusion radius for a service strike, and any article giving you one in metres is inventing it. The distance comes from the asset owner’s instruction and your own site emergency procedure, so agree it in your method statement before you dig rather than guessing it at the trench.
Keep people upwind where gas is involved, and keep the route clear for emergency services.
Make the calls
- DEWA on 991, for any electricity or water asset. It is the 24 hour emergency and technical reporting line.
- Civil Defence on 997 for fire, Ambulance on 998 for injury, Police on 999.
- Etisalat on 101 or du on 155 for telecom.
- Your main contractor and your HSE lead, in parallel and not afterwards.
For gas, hydrocarbon or jet fuel pipelines, call 997 first and notify the pipeline operator through the emergency route given in your NOC conditions. That contact is issued with the permit, which is one reason the NOC belongs on site rather than in an office drawer.
What you must not do
Do not attempt any repair. Not with tape, not with a sleeve, not with anything.
That applies to what looks like cosmetic damage too. A nick in an outer sheath is reportable, because moisture entering a sheath fails the cable later, often weeks later, and often somewhere nobody connects back to your trench.
Do not backfill. Do not tidy up. Do not move the machine until the asset owner or the emergency services say it is safe.
Photograph everything once it is safe to do so, from a distance if necessary. Photographs from the first hour are worth more than anything reconstructed later.
The variants, service by service
Gas and hydrocarbon pipelines
This is the one where the sequence changes.
Stop, shut down and remove ignition sources. Engines off where it is safe to switch them off, no phones used inside the cloud, no vehicles started, no hot work nearby.
Evacuate upwind, call 997 and notify the pipeline operator. Then wait for the pipeline representative, because nobody else should be deciding what happens next at a hydrocarbon line.
Water mains and telecom
For a water main, call DEWA on 991 and clear the excavation of people immediately. Washout undermines trench walls from beneath, so a collapse can follow the strike by several minutes. Protect adjacent services from scour while you wait, and again, no repair.
For telecom, call Etisalat on 101 or du on 155 straight away. Nobody is likely to be hurt, but the exposure is economic and grows by the hour the outage runs, so the speed of the call is the whole game.
Who owns what underground, and whose clearance you needed
| Asset owner | What they own | Clearance route |
| DEWA | Transmission and distribution cables and water mains | DEWA NOC, with GIS drawings, before any excavation near the network |
| RTA | The road reserve and works within it | eNOC and the Right of Way Permit System |
| Dubai Municipality | Sewerage, drainage and irrigation networks | Municipality clearance for the relevant network |
| Etisalat and du | Telecom ducts and chambers | Operator NOC and marked drawings |
| DUSUP | Gas, hydrocarbon and jet fuel pipelines | DUSUP NOC through the E-NOC portal |
| Empower, Tabreed, Emicool | District cooling pipework | The utility’s own NOC and its conditions |
Two things people get wrong. A NOC from one owner is not clearance from another, and a GIS drawing shows where an asset was recorded, not where it is.
District cooling is the most commonly missed of the group. None of those operators publishes generic excavation clearance distances, so the conditions attached to their own NOC are the only answer, read per job.
The safe digging rules that were breached
What Dubai law actually requires
Law No. 6 of 2015 Concerning Protection of the Public Electricity and Water Network in the Emirate of Dubai applies across the emirate, including Special Development Zones and free zones such as the DIFC. Being inside a free zone changes nothing here.
Before excavating near the network it requires, in plain terms:
- Written authorisation from DEWA obtained beforehand.
- Notification 48 hours before starting work.
- A cable detector present on the work site.
- The trial holes DEWA specifies, completed before main works begin.
- Temporary signboards showing the routing of cables and water lines.
- A competent supervisor on site while work proceeds.
It also requires that DEWA is notified promptly where works intersect the network or cause damage, and that work stops until DEWA determines what happens next.
Read that list again after a strike and you can usually see which item was skipped. Rarely the detector. Almost always the trial holes.
The distances, and where they come from
Where mechanical excavation is prohibited, where hand digging starts, the separations to maintain, the distances from tower legs and poles, signboard spacing and the backfill windows are all set out in DEWA’s excavation guidelines and repeated in the conditions attached to your NOC.
Those conditions vary with voltage class and location, so the correct source is the current guideline and the NOC in your site file, not a figure quoted in an article.
One point worth stating plainly. Nominal cable depths are indicative only. Ground gets re-graded and surfaces built up, so cables end up shallower or deeper than the record says. That is exactly why detection and trial pits are required rather than recommended.
What DUSUP requires
For pipelines the rule that everyone should know is the corridor. No work is to be carried out within 60 metres of a pipeline or related facility without an approved written NOC from DUSUP through the E-NOC portal.
Sixty metres surprises people used to thinking in trench widths. You can need a pipeline NOC for work that never comes close to a pipeline.
Inside that corridor, the restrictions on mechanical equipment, the hand excavation zone, the tools permitted, the treatment of jet fuel lines and the requirement for trial pits witnessed by a DUSUP representative are specified in DUSUP’s own excavation and trial pit guidelines and in the NOC conditions. Read them per job.
Why the detection said clear and the cable was there anyway
What a CAT and Genny cannot find
A clear scan is not proof of an empty trench, and treating it as proof is behind a large share of strikes.
In power mode the locator finds live loaded cables and misses unloaded ones. In radio mode it finds long metallic runs and misses short services and plastic. With a transmitter connected it does much better, but only on what you connected it to.
Nothing in that toolkit finds an empty plastic pipe, a clay drain, an empty fibre duct or a dead cable. Depth performance is limited, typically a couple of metres, and it degrades in congested ground because parallel services distort each other’s signals.
The instrument also needs annual recalibration and a daily function check. A locator that has had neither is a prop, not a survey tool.
What fills the gap
Ground penetrating radar sees non conductive services and voids that electromagnetic locating cannot, so it complements the scan rather than replacing it.
PAS 128 describes what a utility survey actually proves, by survey level. It is a British standard, not UAE law, but it is the vocabulary most Dubai survey specifications use, so it is worth writing into your scope.
The same applies to HSG47. UK guidance rather than UAE statute, routinely used as the reference for Dubai method statements because there is no local equivalent at that level of detail. Its central idea is the one that matters: near a known or suspected service, hand digging only.
And the last line remains true regardless of technology. A trial pit is the only verification that counts, because it is the only method that shows you the service rather than inferring it.
What happens afterwards, the law and the points
Fines and compensation under Law No. 6 of 2015
The law sets fines for the listed violations, running from AED 3,000 to AED 10,000 depending on the violation. Fines double for a repeat of the same violation within a year, subject to a maximum of AED 100,000.
Separately from the fine, the violator compensates DEWA for the damage, plus an additional 10 percent of the compensation amount as administrative charges.
DEWA may also suspend the works or revoke the authorisation, which for most contractors is the consequence that actually hurts.
The Green and Black Point System
Administrative Resolution No. 5 of 2022 established DEWA’s Green and Black Point System, an electronic record kept against authorisation holders and violators.
Black points accumulate by category, and the thresholds carry escalating consequences:
- Category A, at 18 black points in a year, suspends work at the sites where the violations occurred.
- Category B, at 35 points, brings project termination, suspension of permits, replacement of responsible staff and a stop on new certificates.
- Category C, at 48 points, means work suspension, revocation of permits, and a replacement contractor stepping in.
Black points are removed after a year without repetition of the same violation. Green points work the other way, earned for completing projects without warnings, providing emergency support, submitting documentation properly and on time, exceeding protection standards, and reporting violations affecting DEWA assets. A net positive green balance can reduce settlement amounts.
That is the part procurement should read. A strike is not only an invoice. It is a number on a register that follows your NOCs across every other project you are running.
Who pays in practice
The asset owner recovers from the contractor named on the NOC, who then looks down the chain to the subcontractor whose machine did it, and across to insurers.
Market practice, rather than a rule, is that UAE contract works and liability policies commonly exclude or sub limit damage to existing underground services. Read your own policy wording before you need it, because assuming this is simply insured is where budgets get hurt.
The three things a plant supplier controls
Most of a strike investigation looks at things a rental company never touches. Three items are the exception, and they appear in nearly every one.
Operator competence
Third party certification for the machine class, not a general licence. Documented experience adjacent to live services. The relevant permits for the machine and the site.
An experienced operator is not the same as a certified one, and an investigation only recognises the second.
Machine selection
A smaller machine near congested services is not a downgrade, it is control. A mini excavator in a tight trench gives finer movement and less reach to get wrong.
The attachment matters more still. For the final layers near a known service, a toothless tilt or grading bucket rather than a toothed one, because a tooth concentrates force onto a point, and a point is what penetrates a duct or a sheath.
When we are asked to send a toothed bucket for work near marked services, we say so and note the recommendation on the paperwork. Sometimes the client insists, which is their call. It just needs to be written down.
Banksman provision, and the paperwork that proves it
A banksman who can see both the bucket and the exposed service, with agreed signals and genuine stop work authority. Not a spare labourer standing behind the machine.
Then the record. A signed handover sheet showing machine type, attachment fitted, operator certification numbers and any written recommendation given at delivery.
That sheet is what everyone leans on afterwards, hirer included. Investigations turn on what can be evidenced, and a verbal warning at a gate cannot be.
Frequently asked questions
What do you do if you hit an underground cable? Stop all work and treat the machine and the ground as live. The operator stays in the cab unless there is fire. Nobody approaches or touches the machine. Set an exclusion zone, call DEWA on 991, and add 997, 998 or 999 for fire or injury. Attempt no repair of any kind.
Should the operator stay in the machine? Yes, if the machine is or may be in contact with the service. Inside the cab he is not bridging the machine and the ground. If fire forces him out, he jumps clear landing with both feet together, never touching machine and ground at once, then moves away with feet together rather than walking normally.
Who do I call if I damage a DEWA cable? DEWA on 991, immediately. It is the 24 hour emergency and technical reporting line for electricity and water. Add 997 for fire, 998 for ambulance and 999 for police as the situation requires. Law No. 6 of 2015 also requires prompt notification to DEWA and that work stops until DEWA determines the process.
Can I repair a damaged cable sheath myself? No, under any circumstances. Even damage that looks cosmetic must be reported rather than patched, because moisture entering through a damaged sheath causes failure later, often long after your crew has left. Taping a sheath is a violation and a hazard, and it converts a reportable incident into a concealed one.
How deep are DEWA cables buried? Deep enough to be assumed present, and never deep enough to rely on. Nominal depths are indicative only, and re-grading, resurfacing and later works routinely change actual cover. That is precisely why the law requires detection equipment on site and the trial holes DEWA specifies, rather than trusting a depth figure.
How far can I dig from a DEWA cable? The working distances, where mechanical excavation stops and hand digging begins, are set in DEWA’s excavation guidelines and repeated in your NOC conditions, and they vary with voltage class and location. Take them from the NOC in your site file rather than from any general figure, and treat trial pits as mandatory regardless.
What is the fine for damaging a DEWA cable? Under Law No. 6 of 2015 fines run from AED 3,000 to AED 10,000 by violation type, doubling for a repeat of the same violation within a year up to a maximum of AED 100,000. Separately, the violator compensates DEWA for the damage plus 10 percent of that compensation as administrative charges.
What are DEWA black points? They are the record under Administrative Resolution No. 5 of 2022, held against authorisation holders and violators. At 18 points in a year work is suspended at the violation sites, at 35 points projects are terminated and permits suspended, and at 48 points permits are revoked. Points clear after a year without repetition.
Talk to us before the bucket goes in
The parts of this that a plant supplier controls are small, and they are also the parts that keep showing up in investigations.
If you are excavating near marked services, tell us that when you book rather than when the machine arrives. It changes what we send. A smaller excavator for a congested trench, a toothless grading bucket for the final layers, an operator certified for that machine class, and the recommendation written on the handover sheet so the record exists.
We hire mini and wheeled excavators, backhoe loaders, skid steer and wheel loaders, with certified operators on request, across Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Abu Dhabi, Ras Al Khaimah and Al Ain.
Dream Way Equipment and Machinery Rental LLC Ras Al Khor Industrial Area 2, Dubai Phone: 056 857 8181 or 054 581 9331 WhatsApp: +971 56 857 8181 Email: info@dreamwayrental.com Available 24/7, including breakdown and mobilisation support
Send us the trench detail, what is marked in the ground and your NOC conditions, and we will match the machine and the attachment to the job before it leaves the yard.