Over the past several years, Utility Safety Partners (formerly Alberta One Call) worked closely with various contacts within the Alberta government to develop proposed legislation to mitigate the impacts of damage to critical utility infrastructure in the province. Like everyone and everything else, our efforts were derailed by the pandemic.

Since 2002, Alberta One-Call Corp.’s mandate included promoting education and awareness on initiating the damage-prevention process. While the call to action has shifted from Call Before You Dig to ClickBeforeYouDig, and now includes Where’s the LINE, promoting overhead powerline safety and awareness, the goal has always been the same — promote safety, and the safety process, to Albertans.

 

2021 was another very busy year for Utility Safety Partners! By yearend, our Notification Centre, which remains the core of our operations, had processed over 468,000 locate requests and notified our members of excavation activity near their buried assets 1.6 million times - the most annual locate requests USP has processed in over 10 years. Interestingly, that amount of activity would have kept the Notification Centre absolutely BUZZING with activity ten years ago but today, with 85% of locate requests originating on the web, that’s just not the case anymore.

In any corporate environment, there is organizational memory (sometimes referred to as institutional memory), which is usually defined as a combination of organizational archives (data and records of what happened when, process changes, etc.) and the memories of individual people (the experiences of people like me). In theory, the value of organizational memory is the ability to access and analyze the past to prevent re-inventing the wheel, or to find solutions that can be re-used, or as a road map for avoiding past mistakes. While I grant the importance of keeping records and data from the history of the organization, I don’t think they are of much value without someone to give them colour and context.

What seems to be a straightforward, common sense step in preventing damage could be bypassed in the field, with potentially disastrous outcomes. Part of the pre-excavation safety meeting should always be a review of the locates that were requested. Identify and confirm the markings or clearances for each utility that was notified on your locate request. Make sure that all assets known to be in the area have been identified and marked before excavation begins.

When it’s time to locate buried facilities, it’s up to the buried facility operator to provide a competent locator to the ground disturber. Before the line-locating process begins, you should provide the locator with all of the buried facility information you’ve gathered about the site, including information from pipeline surveys, maps, plot plans, land title certificates and as-builts.

"The weather was bad, and I was the first one there. We got our rigging all set up and went to the supervisors and they checked all our safety lines and gave us the OK to start power washing.

I was tied off at the time. I unhooked my lanyard, hooked it back myself, and my coworker put his hands up and said, ‘No.’ I climbed up on the handrail and then something odd happened. I was thrown back about 10 feet and down 30 feet.”

The Contact Centre is extending its quality assurance program to give a more varied eye to agent monitoring (the process of assessing a random selection of customer interactions each week to evaluate agent performance) by adding three elevated agent roles to rotate in and out of helping ensure our quality requirements. The onboarding process for this exciting opportunity is just finishing up, and soon I will begin Session 1 of the training and onboarding marathon that lies ahead. May is a scant three months away (it’s true!) and having our full staff onboarded, trained, and integrated is priority Number 1. Juggling these tasks will take herculean focus, attention, skill and smidge of luck.

Events like the April Dig Safe month have been modified to be conducted through virtual meetings and without the 200-plus-person tradeshow and symposiums taking place. Large indoor gatherings are still not possible in today’s COVID restricted environment. Use of social media and newsletters, coupled with radio delivery of messaging from April through October (after digging season and agricultural seeding are complete) can provide the mechanisms to keep safety messaging delivery continuous, despite our inability to gather in large groups.