Good!
We are proud to present work & people productive in the community that inspires us, paves a way toward thriving & aspiration for change.
This, is what good looks like.
Changemaker:
Sam Wiffen
26 January 2024
Sam Wiffen is a self-described curious cat, with an aversion to the “we’ve always done it that way” approach to infrastructure. Asking why, digging deeper (not always literally), learning by doing and innovating are the things that make him happiest.
That makes him a key contributor to Thriving Infrastructure, applying those qualities plus big-picture thinking to leading the experiment group a future we are committing to today.
The underground’s the limit
Questioning what a net positive infrastructure might look like, he’s committed to
enabling consensus around shared aspirations and investment in long-term action - commitments, decisions and solutions - that will support a thriving future for our industry, workforce, communities and whānau nationally and locally.
Already engaged in discussing innovative solutions and sustainability with several organisations, he’s hoping to initiate some clearly-scoped research this year.
The same attributes come together in his business Reveal, New Zealand’s experts in the underground utility surveying space.
Operating In what Sam sees as a neglected world, Reveal uses a combination of technologies – specifically electromagnetic locators in tandem with ground-penetrating radar – to locate and map the labyrinth of underground utilities which serve cities and citizens.
Knowing exactly where they are is critical to many large infrastructure projects, especially in already-developed dense urban areas. Accidental utility strikes, where contractors damage underground power, gas, water or telecommunications assets, causes an estimated $2 billion of damage every year. In the worst-case scenario they can lead to the injury or deaths of onsite workers or members of the public.
Sam – or “Wiff” as he’s known in the industry - started in construction, then moved into the heavy electrical sector.
Curiosity about the underworld was first piqued when working as a project manager and using utility locators to find underground services. But the capability within the industry to get the best out of the tools available, and poor data quality, weren’t up to the job of ensuring worker wellbeing and project success.
“Utility strikes are a leading cause of damage and delays, and they’re eminently preventable if the sector follows Safety By Design principles” he says. “If you know upfront where that pipe is you can divert away from it.”
Worker wellbeing is clearly an important motivator for Wiff. “Being promoted as a changemaker in health and safety is better really than any other accolade in the industry,” he says.
His drive to understand the underground and its risks led him to investigate near-surface geophysics, and soon to employing geologists and geophysicists qualified in the area. His talents, he says, don’t lie there but in technology, emerging trends, business practices – all of which he has packaged up with other specialist expertise in Reveal.
Early jobs, successes and mistakes saw him lead the development of utility locating services from simply marking services on the ground with painted lines to delivering complex digital data in CAD to engineers, contractors and project managers, building Reveal’s reputation as he went.
There are countless examples where the Reveal team identified gas pipes, fibreoptic cables, power lines, water mains sometimes up to 15 metres away from where the utility plans showed them. On one project, Wiff realized he could save the customer $170,000 on a new build when he located two existing conduits that could easily be joined up to carry new services. That rendered the project redundant.
Now the company does it all. “We’re Swiss Army knives,’ he says, “We have to be engineers, geophysicists, infrastructure specialists, draftspeople, as well as software developers and UX designers and so on.”
It was at a conference in the States in 2016 that he realized New Zealand – and his company – was a global leader in this space. Maybe it’s a natural progression from our Number 8 wire mentality, he muses.
Reveal now has 60 staff based in the States, Australia, the Philippines and New Zealand. When we phoned he was at Houston Airport waiting for a flight to Austin, Texas to visit a prospective client. Next stop Chicago, then onto Singapore, followed by Hong Kong.
He has grand visions for the future of mapping the underground world, giving city planners and developers the same understanding of the subsurface as they enjoy of the aboveground environment. In the meantime, he clearly enjoys the like minds he finds in the Thriving Infrastructure community and the untapped potential for both Reveal and the infrastructure sector to create safer, more efficient working environments.
For him it’s not “the sky’s the limit,” he says. “It’s the underground.”