Warren King and Co. have been active members of APIA for some years and were one of the first surveying specialists to become members. The fact that several more surveying companies have become members since then is a reflection on the importance of surveying to the pipeline industry. More and more reliance is being placed on GIS applications for designing and operating pipelines.

What is GIS? GIS means Geographical Information System. The key word here is ‘Geographical’. For any Geographical Information System to work it needs to know ‘where it is’ and surveyors are experts in determining ‘where it is’. It is Warren’s belief that surveyors should be consulted when it comes to working with GIS.

Warren was involved in the design and construction stages of the Dampier to Bunbury Gas Pipeline (DBNGP) during the early 1980s. It was decided that the pipeline information such as pipe numbers, weld numbers, weld locations and all associated data needed to be collected on that project. There was no GPS and no GIS so an innovative solution needed to be found to enable this to be done with the technology available at the time. This was also about the time the first IBM Personal Computers came on the market. The processing power of these computers was only 4.77 MHz and they used the old 5.25 inch floppy drives with 360 kB of data.

Eventually, Warren and others developed a system of recording the requisite data for the pipeline and a method to relate this data to the surveyed easement for the pipeline. This data was recorded to a database using an IBM PC and DBII. This data has since been converted to a GIS format and is included in the DBNGP GIS.

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Warren feels that this system developed under his guidance was one of the first ‘GIS’ systems used in the pipeline industry. He says that the knowledge gained on that project and the nearly 11,000 km of pipelines since would place him amongst the most experienced in the industry.

Since starting Warren King and Co. in 1985, Warren and his employees have developed an expertise second to none, and they are able to offer a complete package for a project from inception through to completion. This includes initial planning and mapping, route selection, all land matters, cadastral surveys, engineering surveys, construction surveys and as-built surveys, as well as all GIS and alignment sheets and compilation of as-built data.

Warren says that there is no job too remote, too big or too small for the team to handle. They work within constraints and deliver the services and information required through all stages of a project and long after the pipeline has been built.