Utility Safety Partners 2024 Report on Operations

Mike Sullivan - President, Utility Safety Partners

2024 was another busy year for USP – and you can read all about it in our 2024 Report—but if you’re looking for the Coles Notes version, voilà!

While processing locate requests, the core function of the corporation, followed the anticipated peaks and valleys of the digging season, welcoming Rogers Communications Inc. and launching the long-anticipated Alternate Locater Provider Program (ALP) were, without question, the high-water marks on the year.

For decades, Shaw Communications chose not to register its buried network with Alberta One-Call Corporation (now USP). Instead, the company created a parallel locate request service that only served its own assets. To help protect Shaw’s network, USP’s agents routinely reminded Albertans requesting locates through our services to also contact Shaw directly because they were not a USP member and therefore, would not be aware of the digging project. We heard a lot of anxiety from Albertans and the Alberta digging community about Shaw’s reluctance to register its assets with USP. Comments like, “Why won’t they just register? It would make the process so much easier!” or, “Is there any way they can forced to become a USP member?” were commonplace but outside moral persuasion or legislation, there was little that could be done.

All that changed when Rogers’ purchase of Shaw was finally completed, and it was a good day when I publicly announced at USP’s 40th Anniversary and Safety Conference in February 2024 that Rogers would be registering assets formerly owned by Shaw with USP. The announcement was met with a round of applause and I noted a big smile on the face of my predecessor, Bob Chisholm, who was president of Alberta One-Call Corporation for 27 years and no stranger to the challenges with Shaw.

Later in the year, on August 1, and after two and a half years of development, USP launched the ALP providing the professional digging community with a new option to secure locates. By years’ end, the ALP had been selected over 8,000 times by professional excavators and even more impressive, no damages were recorded on any ALP excavation projects—a metric that exceeds the most recent data of 7.09 damages per thousand locate requests documented in the Canadian Common Ground Alliance’s 2023 DIRT Report (Table 2).

USP has provided Contact Centre Services for Manitoba and Saskatchewan since 2013 and 2015 respectively. Combined with those provinces, USP’s Contact Centre processed over 600,000 locate requests across the prairie provinces and issued over 1.6 million notifications to members of proposed ground disturbances. With the vast majority of locate requests now submitted online/ClickBeforeYouDig across Canada, USP’s Contact Centre’s functions have changed from a call-answering service to a facilitation provider assisting users through USP’s online chat function or responding to inquiries submitted to info@utilitysafety.ca.

So, what do we have planned for 2025? Processing another half million or so locate requests for sure! But beyond that, we’re working on some new initiatives to better protect public, worker and community safety across Alberta and beyond.

One of the most highly anticipated is the Look Up and Live Application, which will launch in early Q2 2025. The application provides any person with the ability to see participating members’ overhead energy and utility assets enabling them to plan their work accordingly. The application was first introduced in Australia and has contributed to the reduction of contacts with overhead power lines by a significant margin. We’ll also roll out new functions in locate request software shared with Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. These new functions will help improve the locate request process—particularly for heavy users who also use the software to manage their locate requests.