Conquering the Paper Mountain
As printed in World Pipelines
By Joe Pikas, Corrosion Specialist, Technical Toolboxes
An as-built drawing is a revised drawing created and submitted by a project engineer after a pipeline construction project has been completed. They include any changes made from the initial drawings during the construction process, and provide an exact rendering of the pipeline, valves, or other components as it appears upon completion. However, pipelines can be affected by new construction and relocation, because of encroachment.
Technical Toolboxes’ pipeline engineering subject matter expert Joe Pikas was involved in engineering construction back in the 1960s, and like any project, they never went according to the way they were designed for many reasons. These included land issues, right-of-way (ROW) issues, and geological issues that affected the ability to put it in the way it was designed due to issues with swamps, etc. Today, pipeline engineers would use horizontal directional drilling to avoid the issues, but back then they could not. As a result, the way the pipeline was drawn on paper did not always work out in real life.
Read how decades’ worth of redlined as-built drawings used to be the norm in pipeline construction projects, and how they have been made a thing of the past.
