Utility Safety Partners' Locating and Marking Task Force

Utility Safety Partners’ Locating and Marking Task Force

While the front-end of the damage prevention process — requesting a locate through Utility Safety Partners — is simple and broadly available by phone or web, locating and marking underground infrastructure requires a great deal more resources – especially for those utilities that are most frequently encountered by excavations; namely, distribution gas, telecommunications, distribution electric and municipal utilities. There was a time when individual utility owners employed their own locating staff but as time marched on, coordinating multiple representatives to do the same thing - locate and mark buried assets - became inefficient. 

"Excavators had to wait for every locator to locate and mark their respective underground infrastructure before they could begin their digging project,” says Mark Bradley, a consultant working with Utility Safety Partners (USP) to help address locate delays. "That reality created Locate Consortiums — a group of shallow utility owners — that selected a locating contractor to locate and mark all consortium member utilities,” says Iain Stables, Supervisor – Damage Prevention with ATCO Gas. "It was a big improvement.” 

Today, locate consortiums manage the locating and marking process in Calgary, Edmonton and other urban centres across the province. While the practice is more efficient, it isn’t without challenge. Despite best efforts to staff accordingly prior to the digging season’s big push, which usually begins in April and May, locate delays continue to occur and plague the digging community and buried utility owners alike. 

"In our Northern Hemisphere, where a year’s worth of projects are jammed into eight months (if we’re lucky), any backlog is going to cause big problems,” says Mark Bradley.

"Locating and marking really hasn’t changed in thirty years” continues Iain. "We can’t keep trying to solve the locate delay problem with the same tools we’ve been using. We need new tools.”

The problem isn’t resources. The challenge is managing those resources to maintain safety. 

"There isn’t a locator shortage in Alberta. In fact, it’s quite the opposite,” says Iain. "The challenge is managing resources and performance to ensure public, worker and community safety, as well as the ongoing integrity of the buried assets.”

The problem has been analyzed for a long while and a few unique practices in other parts of the world show promise. "We will never have a 12-month digging season,” says Mark Bradley "it’s just not going to happen here. But we can manage the abundant resources through development and management of procedural standards.”

Earlier this year, a Task Force reporting to USP President Mike Sullivan, began development of a Locating and Marking Standard. When completed, the Standard will follow the same process as the GD 201 Standard, meaning a training provider can request a copy of the Standard to develop Locating and Marking classroom or online training. Once their training program is completed, it is submitted to USP for review in accordance with the Standard. If the program passes, it receives endorsement and can be offered broadly. Trainees who complete the training, and pass a field assessment, become part of a pool of certified locating and marking technicians available to utility owners and the digging community alike.

"It’s another option,” says Iain. "The digging community can choose the conventional route and secure locates through the consortiums or they can select a certified locate technician to perform locates for them.” The latter option would mean the digging community incurs those costs; however, it is likely that costs would simply be rolled into contracts with the project proponent.

"Time is money” says Mark "and with the risk of locate delays due to a sudden increase in excavation activity or inclement weather, having a locate tech on-hand might make the most sense.”

Mike Sullivan - President - Utility Safety Partners