Warren and Maura King said “We would like to offer our sincere thanks and appreciation to all of our friends in the pipeline industry for the support over the last 24 years. We have sold our businesses known as Warren King & Company and Midland Survey Services to Ian Olson of Freshwater Bay Investments Pty Ltd. Ian is new to this industry so Warren will be remaining on as CEO for the foreseeable future. It is Ian’s intention to get to know you all as soon as he can and the business will continue to service the industry in the same friendly and efficient way. The business names will remain unchanged.”

Warren King & Company has been an active member of APIA for some years and was 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 – with the key word being “geographical”. For any GIS to work it needs to know “where it is” and surveyors are experts in determining this. Thus it is Warren’s belief that surveyors should be consulted when it comes to working with GIS.

GIS technology is continually evolving and improving and it is important that everyone keeps abreast of it. Warren King & Company is continually researching and developing routines and tools for assisting those involved in pipelines. During the past year the company has developed PipeSafe, an interactive tool to assist with AS2885 risk assessments. The tool enables the participants to see the GIS and the data input at the same time on the same screen. In conjunction with this it is the company’s intention to develop an interactive design tool to enable design data to be inserted concurrently, thus allowing risk mitigation to occur at the same time as risk assessment.

Warren was involved in the design and construction stages of the Dampier to Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline during the early 1980s. It was decided that the pipeline information such as pipe numbers, weld numbers and 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. For those that don’t recall – or are too young – the processing power was 4.77 MHz and they used the old 5.25 floppy drives with 360 kB of data. To cut a long story short, a system was developed to record the requisite data for the pipeline and to relate this data to the surveyed easement for the pipeline. This data was recorded to a database using an IBM PC and DBII and has since been converted to a GIS format and is included in the DBNGP GIS.

Warren feels that the system developed under his guidance was one of the first “GIS’s” used in the pipeline industry. He believes that the knowledge gained on that project and the nearly 12,000 kilometres of pipelines since would place him amongst the most experienced in the industry.

Since starting Warren King & Company in 1985, Warren and his team have developed an expertise second to none in the surveying, mapping and GIS applications for pipelines.

Warren King & Company is able to offer a complete package for a project from inception through to completion. This includes initial planning and mapping, route selection, all land access matters, cadastral surveys, engineering surveys, construction and as-built surveys plus all GIS and alignment sheets and compilation of as-built data. The company’s staff is continually developing new ideas and techniques to improve and streamline its service utilising the developments being made in the spatial sciences industry, and will continue to do so as the industry grows.

“There is no job too remote, too big or too small for our team to handle,” says Warren. “We work within your constraints and deliver to you the services and information you require through all stages of your project and long after the pipeline has been built.”

Warren and Ian together believe that this ethos will remain with the business under the new ownership and will continue to grow.

Warren King & Company is continually researching and developing routines and tools for assisting those involved in pipelines.