Tracking damage data is a tricky thing, and determining accurate trends from that data is even trickier. Until the establishment of the Common Ground Alliance (CGA), any effort to track, disseminate and identify damage trends from a national perspective proved to be futile. Now, with the CGA’s Damage Information Reporting Tool (DIRT), significant data is being received from nearly all stakeholders and trends are beginning to be identified. Unfortunately, many of those trends are of great concern to NUCA.

Effective Work on Damage Prevention

Established in 2000, the CGA is a member-driven association dedicated to promoting effective damage prevention practices through the shared responsibility among all stakeholders. Since its inception, the CGA has grown in size, scope and influence through effectively addressing a wide variety of damage prevention issues. NUCA has been an active member all along, serving on the CGA board of directors and all working committees.

The CGA’s membership is made up of virtually all stakeholders in the damage prevention process, including excavators, locators, One-Call centers, all underground facility operators and federal, state and local government representatives. Decision making in CGA committees is done by consensus, meaning that all committee members must agree on an item to make the decision final. NUCA has found the CGA to be an extremely effective organization, not only in reducing damages, but also in leveling the playing field between excavators and underground facility operators in terms of stakeholders meeting their responsibilities in damage prevention.

Cause for Concern

From the beginning, collection and dissemination of accurate damage data and identification of damage trends has been a high-profile goal of the CGA. Over several years, the CGA’s Data Reporting Committee worked to develop and maintain a user-friendly program that would allow CGA stakeholder groups to submit damage data and collect certain information from the system to enhance their damage prevention initiatives. The end result was the DIRT system, which is now in its third year of operation.

The DIRT serves as a national repository for data on excavation damage for the purpose of identifying trends related to it. For example, DIRT attempts to answer some of the following common questions: Who is really responsible for these damages? What are the root causes behind the majority of them? What type of work is involved when these damages occur?

As in any initiative, you only get out what you put into a database, and herein lies the problem. In this instance, what’s coming out of it reflects serious under-reporting on the part of underground utility contractors. Why is this a problem? The U.S. Congress, several federal agencies and scores of state regulators with jurisdiction over state one-call and damage prevention laws are now looking at the data trends that are coming out of DIRT, and they do not paint a pretty picture for contract excavators.

Take for example some of the data trends reported in the 2006 CGA DIRT Analysis and Recommendations (Vol. 3), released on March 26, 2008.

Facility “Events” (hits) by Known Root Cause Group:

• Notification not made: 38 percent
  
• Excavation practice not sufficient: 38 percent
  
• Location practice not sufficient: 18 percent

• Contractor/Developer: 80 percent
  
• Occupant/Farmer: 10 percent
  
• Utility Personnel: 5 percent
  
• State, County, Municipal: 5 percent

In other words, according to the DIRT report, 76 percent of events are caused by excavators not calling the One-Call center or not digging carefully and less than 20 percent are caused by facility operators failing to mark utility locations accurately and in a timely fashion. On top of that, the vast majority of these incidents (80 percent) are caused by contract excavators, not by in-house utility personnel, homeowners or government workers. Would you agree with these statistics?

Get Involved!

All stakeholder groups are allowed to use the DIRT system. The oil and gas pipeline industry, the entire telecommunications industry, cable and other fiber, water and sewer officials and other underground facility operators are already voluntarily submitting their damage data and most likely leaving out incidents caused by inaccurate locates and in-house facility excavators. The excavation community, on the other hand, is not adequately submitting the data that would almost certainly tell a different story, at least in terms of root cause and type of excavator involved in facility hits.

The bottom line is this: Our industry must begin to use the DIRT system, and we must begin now. We encourage you to visit www.cga-dirt.com to find out more and to register, so that you can begin to submit your damage data. If you are hesitant to register with DIRT but would like to assist NUCA with getting our industry’s data into the system, you can download the DIRT form at www.nuca.com. Simply fill out this form when your company is involved in facility damage and fax it to NUCA at (703) 358-9307, and NUCA will submit the data for you. Keep in mind, all submissions are anonymous; your company’s name will not appear on the form or be submitted into the DIRT system.

NUCA has always fully supported the CGA and its initiatives and will continue to do so. Besides serving on the board of directors and all working committees, NUCA is a bronze sponsor of the organization. However, the trends that are coming out of DIRT raise concern because all stakeholders are not submitting their data, namely the excavation community.

Since the CGA began, the organization’s role and responsibility has grown exponentially. In addition to developing damage prevention best practices, the CGA currently addresses safety recommendations issued by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), assists the U.S. DOT’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) on virtually all PHMSA damage prevention activities and is frequently invited to testify on Capitol Hill.
The data trends that come out of the CGA are being taken very seriously by a variety of government organizations. We owe it to the industry to ensure that this data is as accurate as it can be. The ramifications of the dissemination of inaccurate data about responsibilities for facility damages are potentially disastrous. We hope you will step up to the plate and help us out.

Eben Wyman is NUCA Vice President of Government Relations.