The Power of Participation: Rewriting the Damage Prevention Process guidelines
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Sher Kirk - Operations Director - Utility Safety Partners
In the News – the USP Best Practices Committee releases version 7.0 of The Damage Prevention Process in Alberta.
When ABCGA, Alberta One-Call, and Where’s the Line merged and became Utility Safety Partners, we imagined a collaborative, open organization where industry stakeholders could come together to make positive changes in damage prevention. It is our hope to provide a place for the voice of more than just notification services, but also contractors, locators, regulators, training organizations, suppliers, and asset-owners. We all have a part to play in the shared responsibility of damage prevention and we must work together to make sure assets are protected and everyone goes home safe at the end of the day.
The industry-led USP committees provide a place where everyone has a voice, and everyone can engage. I am lucky to be the USP liaison to the best practices committee, where I recently had the opportunity to see that engagement in action. Sixteen months ago, the committee took on the task of updating The Damage Prevention Process in Alberta: Roles, Responsibilities and Expectations of Stakeholders in the Prevention of Damage to Underground Facilities (the DPP). The DPP is a unique document—a made-in-Alberta solution for understanding how to apply industry standards and best practices in real-world settings. To be useful, the document must include the insights and experiences of a wide range of subject matter experts and is not meant to be one stakeholder group’s interpretation of the rules.
To ensure the committee was able to consider a variety of opinions, they first tasked themselves with ensuring the committee was representative of critical stakeholder groups. Over time, the committee membership had changed, and mostly through attrition, had become heavily weighted toward asset-owners. There has been a concentrated effort over two years to engage with other stakeholder groups, and the current best practices committee has grown into a truly balanced group of SMEs.
With the right voices around the table, the best practices committee engaged in spirited discussions to come to consensus on a multitude of possible topics to decide what should be included in the guidelines, and how best to assist stakeholders in understanding their responsibilities for safe excavations in our province. It was truly an exercise in cooperation to produce the latest version of the DPP. The committee worked through the viewpoints of locators versus asset-owners versus excavators versus government to find our way to a complete document that considers all stakeholders. There are many people to thank for this accomplishment, but special recognition is deserved for Ed Plant (TEP R-O-W, committee chair) and Derek Vokins (ATCO Gas, committee vice-chair) as they pulled it all together and kept the committee moving forward when debates got lively and threatened to derail the project. The resulting document belongs to all stakeholders thanks to the many participants who contributed. I encourage you to review the new guidelines, and if you have comments or suggestions, do not hesitate to get involved with the best practices committee to help create the next version of this continually evolving guideline for safety.
