The Alternate Locate Provider Option Goes LIVE

Mike Sullivan – President – Utility Safety Partners

Two-and-a-half years ago, a team of subject matter experts assembled to blue-sky ideas on how to improve locating and marking in Alberta. The front-end of the process — submitting a locate request — has experienced its fair share of enhancements, like shifting from calls to clicks as well as several other procedural changes associated with self-managing the locate request process, but locating and marking, the backend of the damage prevention process, has remained largely as is. 

The Alberta digging community has been well-served in Alberta with federally and provincially regulated pipelines mandated to locate and mark those buried assets, and consortium members — buried utilities most commonly appearing on a locate slip (ATCO Gas, ATCO Electric, ATCO Pipelines, ENMAX, EPCOR, FortisAlberta, TELUS, City of Calgary, and the City of Edmonton) — dispatching one locate provider to mark multiple utilities. Despite those advantages, challenges remained. For starters, the Alberta digging season is compressed into eight months (if we’re lucky), creating an up-and-down hiring and training cycle, locate requests are on the rise, and consortium contracts have inadvertently created a bottleneck limiting the number of locators providing services. The Alternate Locate Provider Program (ALP) changes that by opening the consortium bottleneck to more locators than ever before and providing the digging community with the option of hiring a locate service provider directly.

The ALP is only available to members of the digging community, not to homeowners, and secondly, it’s optional. When an excavator submits a locate request and chooses the ALP option, they select and pay for a locate service provider identified on USP’s website to locate and mark consortium-buried utilities in the vicinity of their dig site. To maintain the integrity of the locating and marking process, locator contractors listed on USP’s website have been trained and successfully completed a third-party assessment allowing them to provide this service. When an excavator does not choose the ALP option, locating and marking consortium member utilities proceeds the same way it always has; meaning, participating consortium members dispatch a locator to do so. The downside of the existing process is the increased possibility of delays associated with those issues noted above.

At the time of this writing, 10 locate service providers are listed on USP’s website to help get your next excavation project completed — and there are more to come!

Like everything, the ALP will improve over time but there’s no question it will be a gamechanger. 

I wish to recognize and thank the members of the Locating and Marking Task Force who worked incredibly hard through many challenges, Astec Safety and Global Training Centre who teamed up to create and deliver the ALP Locating and Marking Training and CAPULC for working with us to bring the ALP to fruition.