Wellington is the first city in New Zealand to develop an underground asset register, an interactive digital map of the buried lifelines that carry essential services like water, power, gas and fibre.

This new online platform is a 12-month pilot.

Wellington City Council is conducting the beta version while the system is being fine-tuned to meet the infrastructure sector's needs.

Wellington is like other cities in New Zealand and worldwide. The records of what's underground are sometimes incomplete and in some cases inaccurate.

That can cause unnecessary disruption for our customers, our network, costly project delays and risk to our workers' safety.

As billions of dollars in construction is happening across the city, Wellington has a golden opportunity while the ground is open to capture exactly what is where.

Being able to view all of the utilities on a single map is going to help us to plan our work.

It'll make it easier for us to communicate the location of underground utilities to our teams on site and therefore reduce the chances of us damaging them.

One of the best features of this new platform is that it enables us to capture and share site observations.

If we see something that's not where we expected it to be or it isn't on any plans, then we can take a photo, capture some key information and load it straight into the register.

By sharing what we find when the ground is open, we can help to make the records more accurate for future users.

It's always good to have good records. We haven't got good records on a good service plan and you're pretty much taking blind.

If the plans are even off by a metre, then it's costing everybody money. It's dangerous.

At the moment, there's a lot of guessing games. Our team deals with coolouts to fix water, waste water and storm water issues.

That can mean working at night or weekends. The Online Underground Asset Register will give us access 24/7 to all plans combined on one map.

We won't have to wait around for anyone else to get the information for us.

The register combines utility owners' records and where their assets are in a federated online platform.

This means the utility data stays with the utility but is available to anyone working underground.

We'll continue to engage with the sector as we progress through the pilot phase.

Access is provided free as a public good. A minimal cost recovery fee will apply when organisations make a corridor access request to the City Council for a permit to excavate.

The register is a journey that will take time, but input from locators, surveyors, excavators, contractors, designers and others in the sector will help it become a one-stop, trusted, accurate source of information.

Our City is working with the infrastructure sector for the potential rollout of the new digital mapping system so New Zealand can develop a National Underground Asset Register to build our nation and keep our people safe.