The Challenge with Large Project Tickets

By Kassi Zaba, Public Awareness Coordinator

Large Project tickets are for areas larger than 60,000 square meters in urban areas, or larger than 800,000 square meters in rural areas. They are designed for pre-planned jobs which continue over a significant area and length of time. The large scope of these projects typically requires a planning meeting between excavators and affected facility owners in the area before locates are requested. These planning meetings allow the excavator and locator an opportunity to understand the complexity of the site and the project timeline, and plan a schedule that accommodates both parties. 

Although Large Project tickets can be beneficial, allowing excavators the ease of submitting only one ticket for vast expanses, Large Project tickets can pose challenges to facility owners and locators, which can compromise damage prevention and safety practices:

• The physical locate will take multiple days and/or multiple locators to complete. 
• The large work area increases the risk of a facility being missed during the physical locate. 
• The resulting records of locate are long and can be difficult to read and manage. 
• Requesting locates for areas of the project where work will not begin for 30 days results in multiple relocates, increasing the burden on the damage prevention process. 

To maintain the integrity of the damage prevention process and to ensure the safety of all involved parties, facility owners may reject Large Project tickets and ask that they be broken down into smaller work areas over multiple tickets. 

Best practices for submitting tickets over a large work area:

1. Submit one ticket covering the first portion of your work area, limiting the length of the dig site to 5 km or less. This ticket should represent the area where work is starting and not the entire project area. The portions/sections of your work area may be determined during pre-planning meetings with the locator, so each section is manageable for each party. 
2. Ensure the correct property type is selected and the map accurately represents your work area. Locators will locate all facilities within the mapped work area. Accurately indicating private property, public property or both allows locators to identify all affected utilities. If the ticket includes private property, locators will need access to all private lots within the work area in order to locate the facilities on private property.  
3. Click the "Continue Ticket" button from the ticket confirmation screen to submit tickets for subsequent portions of your work area. The Continue Ticket function will create a new ticket with the same details as the previous ticket automatically filled in. Enter the date you will begin working in this area in the "Job Start Date" field and draw the next section of your work area on the map. Use Continue Ticket to submit all tickets related to this project. 

Tickets submitted using the Continue Ticket function are automatically linked by the software through information in the "Remarks" field. This allows facility owners and locators to identify multiple tickets as part of one large job. 

Large Project tickets are a helpful tool when planning a considerable job, and the complexities of locating Large Project tickets can often be managed by pre-planning work areas and locate timelines. If you are planning a large excavation project, reach out to the facility owners in your work area and arrange a pre-project meeting. Don’t know who to contact? Our support team is more than happy to help you.