This is shown by the Construction Damage Report for Civil Engineering and #Infrastructure of the VHV insurers. Almost 40,000 claims were examined in the period between 2017 and 2021. The focus on the average costs per claim and year is even more pronounced, with an increase of 31 percent.

Most claims occur in line construction. 57.5 percent of the damage to lines is caused by the use of working machines and 19.7 percent by execution and installation errors. Communication lines are by far the most affected or damaged type of line.

Inaccurate and incomplete site plans were identified as the cause of damage by around 95 percent and imprecise planning information by around 88 percent.

The motivation to contain a further increase in damage repair costs, for example through the introduction of a central line cadastre, is great, especially since the risk of damage occurrence should increase significantly with a focus on digitalisation, the energy and transport transition and the resulting increasing density of the network structure in the future.