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| DIRT Report |
Soon, the Canadian Common Ground Alliance (CCGA) will publish its annual DIRT Report (Damage Information Reporting Tool) and in it, the number of damages in Alberta will look, well, damaging! To the casual observer, damages in Alberta will appear high — too high — compared to neighbouring provinces. But rest assured, we are in good hands!
So why is damage reporting in Alberta so high? Effective ongoing public awareness and education efforts promoting the importance of DIRT reporting is a BIG factor. 67 individual companies report damages into Alberta DIRT, whereas most provinces’ submissions originate from less than a third as many companies. More reporting allows more analysis, which generates more findings and leads to pathways designed to prevent a recurrence. Alberta buried asset owners and contractors have embraced this and are doing a great job.
Another area of the annual DIRT Report that concerns me is identifying the stakeholder categories damaging buried utilities. Every year, contractors are labelled as the most likely to have caused damage. This shouldn’t be a headline — they do the most digging! But at first glance, the DIRT Report makes the digging community look like the "bad guys" when it couldn’t be further from the truth. Digging contractors are constantly learning, training and upgrading their knowledge, practices, procedures and governance on how to dig safely. Their livelihoods depend on it.
To more accurately reflect the professionalism of the digging community, it’s time the DIRT Report captured the ratio of damages to the number of locate requests diligent contractors place annually. Capturing that data would produce a far more accurate portrayal of the digging community’s stewardship and adherence to the damage prevention process. Unfortunately, the DIRT report doesn’t yet drill down to that level of detail, but it needs to for a measurable and actionable statistical analysis of damages incurred based on frequencies and not lump sum totals.
Michael Sullivan