Utility Safety Partners Contact Map
Look out your window and what do you see? Chances are you’re looking at other buildings, homes and businesses throughout your community. Do you ever stop to think about what’s linking all those together? Buried beneath the ground and in many communities, overhead, is a vast network of utilities delivering energy and utility services that help preserve our way of life and keeping them safe from damage is critical to our survival.
Although damage to these assets is rare, even minor damage can interrupt businesses and financial transactions, safety services, communications, heat and other utilities, cause evacuations and initiate emergency response. Utility Safety Partners encourages all parties engaged in the damage prevention process to report damages into the Damage Information Reporting Tool (DIRT). DIRT reporting allows those events to be analyzed to determine root causes and develop practices that will prevent a recurrence.
Prior to unification, the Where’s the LINE campaign maintained a Contact Map that graphically illustrated the location and nature of damages to overhead power lines. Since unification, USP has been working to recreate and enhance WTL’s Contact Map to include damages to overhead and buried utilities and soon, the map will be live on the Utility Safety Partners website.
Why is this important? Even though data associated with damages will be limited, it will still provide utility owners with information that’s difficult to find anywhere else. It will help enhance public awareness program development and improve outreach and communication efforts to better inform the public and digging community of the location of their energy and utility assets and how to work safely near them.
The Contact Map will be populated by stakeholders reporting buried utility damages into DIRT and by our overhead energy and utility members reporting damages to those assets directly to USP.
Mike Sullivan - President - Utility Safety Partners