Annual Common Ground Alliance DIRT Report Reveals Utility Damages Continue Upward Trend

Common Ground Alliance announced the findings from its 2019 Damage Information Reporting Tool Report. The report analyzed all 2019 data submitted voluntarily by facility operators, utility locating companies, one call centers, contractors, regulators and others from the U.S. and Canada using an in-depth statistical modeling process. The results of this analysis found that an estimated 532,000 excavation-related damages to underground facilities occurred in the U.S. in 2019, a 4.5% increase compared to the 2018 estimate of 509,000 damages.

The report also examined the direct and indirect costs of damaging underground infrastructure, and estimated that the societal costs totaled approximately $30 billion in the U.S. in 2019 alone. That figure is more than double the U.S. federal law enforcement budget for 2019, and represents a massive amount of public and private resources spent not only repairing utilities and restoring utility service, but also covering property damage, medical bills, loss of commerce while businesses are interrupted or evacuated, and other indirect costs.

According to CGA DIRT data, estimated annual damages have trended upward since 2015, but largely kept pace with increasing construction activity. The 2019 data shows that for the first time, each dollar of construction spending is resulting in more transmissions from one call centers than in years prior, a possible indicator that the volume of locate requests is putting pressure on the damage prevention process, impacting the ability of locators to complete accurate and timely locates.

The 2019 DIRT Report analyzes the root causes of damages to buried infrastructure to help determine at which step in the safe excavation process incidents occur. While failure to notify the one call center (811) is the single-largest individual root cause, contributing to 29% of damages, other root cause groupings are converging to become roughly equal: excavating issues made up 29% of damage root causes, locating issues were responsible for 28% of damages and the invalid use of locate requests drove 14% of damages in 2019.

As damage root cause groupings become more evenly distributed, the 2019 DIRT Report provides several recommendations that the damage prevention industry can implement to reduce the incidence of damages. These include reviewing CGA best practices that correlate with damage root causes (such as examining hand-digging and excavating within the tolerance zone), examining the pressures on locate technicians as request volume surges, emphasizing the proper use of locate requests and developing strategies for persistent no-call damages.

Damage prevention decision makers will be discussing the future of the industry and DIRT data-informed strategies for reversing the trend of rising damages at the 2021 CGA Conference & Expo, set to take place in Orlando, Florida next March. Attendees will be able to participate in a range of educational sessions that focus on damage root causes and how stakeholders can best share responsibility to achieve our goal of zero damages.

The complete DIRT Annual Report for 2019 is available for download at www.commongroundalliance.com, and stakeholders interested in submitting data to the 2020 report or establishing a Virtual Private Dirt account should visit the DIRT site at www.cga-dirt.com.