Canadian Common Ground Alliance releases 2023 DIRT Report

Mike Sullivan - President - Utility Safety Partners

The CCGA released its 2023 DIRT Report (Damage Information Reporting Tool) at its annual Damage Prevention Symposium earlier this month in Regina, Saskatchewan. The report is based on data submitted voluntarily by stakeholders from across the country that provides a snapshot of the state of buried utility safety in Canada by analyzing information on damages to those buried assets that occur in a calendar year.

The 2023 boasts a continued reduction in damages relative to the number of locate requests and notifications to buried utility owners of planned ground disturbances near those assets. In fact, it’s the fifth year in a row the damage ratio has reduced, and on the surface, that’s good news. But it’s also very difficult to quantify.

For instance, to the casual observer, Table 2 of the 2023 report notes the number of damages reported by province (Note: outside of CER and AER-regulated transmission pipelines, reporting buried utility damage is not mandatory) and Table 16 provides the number of "No Locate" damages. In accordance with Table 2, Ontario and Alberta reported the most damages into DIRT. To the casual observer, it might appear there’s a big problem in those provinces with the damage prevention process or devil-may-care attitude of the digging community but that's not the case at all. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. Alberta and Ontario share the notoriety of having the highest number of registered DIRT submitters — and by a very wide margin. A registered DIRT submitter can be any stakeholder engaged in the damage prevention process who has "signed up" to report damages voluntarily and anonymously into DIRT — and more submitters mean more damages reported. When the number of DIRT submitters are factored in, Ontario and Alberta have the lowest number of damages per registered submitter, which is something to be proud of.

Shifting attention to Table 16, Ontario is the only province in Canada with comprehensive damage prevention legislation (since 2012) and yet, "No Locate" damages in Ontario are almost three times higher than "No Locate" damages in Alberta, the province with which it shares notoriety of the most registered DIRT submitters. So, it begs the question: "Is damage prevention legislation working?" Once again, we need to look a little deeper into the data.

In Alberta, provincially and federally regulated transmission pipelines are required to register the location of their buried assets with Utility Safety Partners (USP); and those pipeline companies are equally required to promote awareness of the existence of those assets and how to live and work safely near them. The combined education and awareness generated over decades from these pipeline companies, numbering in the hundreds, their regulators and USP has had a profound effect on the deep-rooted damage prevention knowledge of the everyday Albertan. In fact, a few years ago, a survey concluded that damage prevention/ClickBeforeYouDig awareness was highest in Alberta compared to every other province, and by a considerable margin. That knowledge has very likely had a profound effect on the number of No Locate damages in our province.

Some data, however, is extremely clear. Table 19 shows Canada has successfully shifted from Calls to Clicks, and we know with absolute certainty that a locate request submitted online reduces damages. So maybe damages really are declining as a result of the increase in web-based locate requests.

In conclusion, the DIRT Report is the only one of its kind sharing damage data in Canada, but it only grazes the surface due to its voluntary reporting nature. And while we tend to compare data from one province to the next, it perhaps isn’t fair to do so because the starting point, i.e. level of awareness, is very different across the country. Rather, I am of the view that all provinces should consider and compare the report’s data with their own year-over-year performance and strive to improve in all areas — starting with increasing the number of registered DIRT submitters. The more data we have, the better we will get at determining root cause. But that isn’t enough. Unless a best practice is developed to mitigate root cause, and an education and awareness program designed and rolled out to promote it, we’ll likely continue to see the same data produced year after year.