12 minute read
What’s next for public safety in the right-of-way?
Wayne Jensen
Director of Safety Stahl & Associates Insurance, Inc. St. Petersburg, Florida
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here is no question that there is a need to develop new strategies to protect the integrity of buried facilities in the public rights-of-way. The number of instances is increasing where damages result in major losses of life. With each catastrophic event we hear the public outcry to protect buried facilities to protect the safety of the public. The challenge of damage protection professionals everywhere is to uncover new strategies to protect the public and all parties working in and around the public ROW.
Current status of damage prevention
The current status of damage prevention in many regions is good enough to keep the rate of damages to buried facilities to about one damage per 1,000 excavations as represented by a one-call system locate ticket. For instance, Florida had 872 damages to a reported 981,000 tickets for the 2010 year which is roughly one damage per 1,000 locates. Some data suggest that overall averages for damage may range between three and five damages per 1,000 locates. It is interesting that locating organizations, which all strive for zero damages, will often accept a quality metric for acceptable damage ratios of their locators to be about the same ratio of one “at fault damage” per 1,000 locates performed.
The “norms” for damage prevention
This opening comment about the current status of damage prevention is used to tell the reader that we may be fighting the “norms” for acceptable risk in driving damages to even lower levels. The damage prevention industry is focused on failures to prevent damage much more than on industry successes. Utility Risk Managers, however, may be looking at the success of most utilities in preventing damage described here and believe little more can be done to lower damage rates without incurring extraordinary costs.
Cost vs. benefit for improving damage prevention
The cost versus benefit barrier surfaces when it comes to investment in damage prevention that may be required to improve the quality aspects of utility locating. The quality of utility locating is a direct function of: (1) the quality of information provided to locators; (2) the quality of the technology being used to locate facilities; and (3) the skill of the locator in using the technology. Out of those three areas almost nothing is being done to improve the quality of data provided to locators for use in locating because the cost is perceived to outweigh the benefit. We continue to uncover many instances where the utility believed their facility was on the other side of the street from where the damage occurred. The facility was marked where the utility’s records stated it was in some cases 100 feet from where it actually was found and damaged. The truth is that improving the quality of buried facility location data—the area of damage prevention which has the most direct bearing on public safety— is the area of greatest opportunity for public safety.
What may cause a shift in the adoption of best practices on the part of all stakeholders to damage prevention is the fact that the density of buried facilities has reached a critical mass of vulnerability. There is an ever-increasing public outcry to do more to protect the public with regard to damage prevention. The human cost of damage in the “court of public opinion” will likely drive the next generation of damage prevention.
Responsibility for protecting buried facilities
Today the current condition is that the responsibility of protecting buried facilities has been totally shifted to the realm of the locator and the excavator. And, the ability of both of these stakeholders to prevent damage is largely dependent on the quality of facility location data which falls into the realm of responsibility of the utility and public owners of the ROW.
It is well established that the utility will not provide Subsurface Utility Engineering (SUE) services for locates. That is easy to understand when the utility is trying to keep the cost of locate tickets in the field down to $10 when they would have to spend $2,000 to $3,000 on a surveyed SUE vacuum excavate to verify the location of buried facilities at a single point or $200 to $400 per point documenting facilities in a ROW.
The author and a number of other damage prevention professionals have put it on the table that public owners should still consider funding SUE data recovery even in the face of seemingly high cost. It is well documented by DOTs around the country that the Return on Investment (ROI) for SUE efforts range from $4 to $22 for every dollar spent. However, the resistance remains. The ROI is usually attributed to using high-quality utility location data to design around conflicts to avoid the high cost of dealing with conflicts during construction and it has the additional benefit of establishing high-quality utility location data for the use of locators and contractors during construction.
What we are finding is that many public owners are more than willing to accept low-quality data for design and see no value in SUE for just damage prevention when they can rely on the law as their damage prevention shield. Additionally, most public owners don’t feel they should pay to protect utilities they don’t own. We are simply not winning the battle for damage prevention that requires non-existent funds to pay for what most in the public owner community believe is the responsibility of “others.”
Excavators and damage prevention
Excavators are extremely capable of avoiding damage without any locate markings at all. The author has personally worked many years before locates were commonly available and suffered/caused minimal damages. Avoiding damage was a function of digging much slower and with much more care to avoid damage. The advent of locates increased production of excavating dramatically. In the early days of excavating with locates all contractors knew that locating was fuzzy science and most would verify location of facilities prior to going into full production mode. If there was a phone cable, power or gas indicated in a given area the contractor would not stop looking until they found the facility no matter what the locate marks indicated and nobody got real testy about it. We worked with utilities and locators to prevent damage when the locator was our friend.
Excavators today
Now, only a few excavators follow the best practice to “verify the location of facilities indicated in a given area no matter how far off locate marks are.” However, even the few that do verify the location of facilities without respect to the inaccuracy of locate marks will not look for a facility in the area of their excavation that the utility states is on the other side of
the street and has provided a clear positive response. And, by the same token, the locator will not check to see if a utility is actually in the area of the excavation when the utility has provided them this same information. This exact circumstance comes up often across the nation. Readers need to understand that in many respects we were better off when backhoe operators knew that a utility was in their work space by noting changes in the color of the disturbed soil they saw as they excavated that resulted from the installation of facilities in the past. Today, backhoe operators pay attention to locate marks, not changes in soil color for damage prevention.
Public safety and damage prevention
Public safety that results from damage prevention will not change until all stakeholders find a way to work together and share the burden and responsibility. The author has worked with utility owners in the past when they were in very difficult conflict circumstances and as a contractor got paid to protect their facilities. Fees for protecting facilities were many times less than the cost of the utility having to relocate. Some project owners and utility owners work together to pay the contractor to be responsible for locating and protecting facilities in cases where there are known problems and conflicts. Design-build projects are beginning to show us that shared responsibility for damage prevention can work. Design-build functionally works on the “no excuses for damage” premise.
The author has proven that the “no excuses for damage” approach can work for contractors as well, but today most contractors believe as public owners believe with respect to bearing the cost for someone else’s responsibility. The law does not require public owners to fund the damage prevention efforts. The law does not require utilities to improve their data for enhanced locating. The law does not require the contractor to conduct SUE work on behalf of other stakeholders. Again, we are up against the great impasse.
If change comes it will be for the sake of public safety
For the “sake of public safety,” however, it is the author’s belief that much more can and will be done. The contractor is the critical stakeholder because they control the backhoe. We all know that current laws are inadequate for taking us to the next level of damage prevention.
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What is needed is the establishment of a “Damage Prevention Partnering Process” involving all stakeholders on a project-by-project basis. This Damage Prevention Partnering Process would closely mimic the partnering processes developed and used by the Associated General Contractors (AGC). All damage prevention initiatives based on improving facility location data quality for design are years away if initiated today but if we begin implementing Damage Prevention Partnering Processes we can make great strides in damage prevention on our “next projects.” What is being suggested is that the “Partnering Process” be used to establish the roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders to damage prevention. Provisions for the Damage Prevention Partnering Process could be specified in contract documents for highway and other projects involving work around existing buried facilities or simply initiated by any stakeholder. There may be some circumstances that would require a contract where a utility would “want” to pay the project contractor to either relocate facilities or to use additional care to prevent damage either because of a conflict or the fact that the utility is unsure of their data. It would be likely that the services of a SUE organization would be employed to investigate troublesome locates as a part of the Damage Prevention Partnering Process if the participants deem that activity to provide value. The participants in the Partnering Process would determine who should bear the cost of professional services that would be necessary to achieve overall lower project cost. In all cases the Partnering Process would outline responsibilities of all parties in the damage prevention effort. The author knows that the law requires much more of the contractor than most understand until they are in the court system. The Damage Prevention Partnering Processes would outline the depth of responsibility of all parties that would improve damage prevention and dramatically reduce the burden of the contractor and keep them out of the court system.
Education is critical
One of the best outreach mechanisms around the country is “Excavator Safety Awareness Events” that are sponsored by the one-call systems and utilities. Universally, these safety awareness events provide excavators with information about the one-call laws of the state and sometimes associated topics. The Damage Prevention Partnering Process described in this article would make attendance to such events a part of the partnering process documents to include all personnel on the project, especially backhoe operators.
Having personally attended many of these industry Excavator Safety Awareness Events, notably absent are people from the field. It is always hoped that the people that do attend will take the information back to the people in the field, but it is always feared the information provided doesn’t reach the backhoe operator and others.
It is envisioned that a Damage Prevention Partnering Process would establish meetings for both workers and managers that have audiencespecific topics to address the unique roles of each in damage prevention. Excavator Safety Awareness Events around the country are well attended by representatives of one-call systems and utilities providing attendees the opportunity to create personal relationships that benefit damage prevention. The Damage Prevention Partnering Process would also include specific locators assigned to the project to provide the opportunity for creating relationships that will have a very positive impact on specific project damage prevention efforts. We believe that this would be the mechanism for all stakeholders to “act their way into a new way of thinking” with new and better approaches to damage prevention on a single project basis that will be applied on future projects.
One of the flaws of providing education to people you likely will never see again, as is the case at Awareness Events, can be overcome when they are associated with a specific project. Industrial trainers all know that in order to determine if any element of training was successful in delivery they must confirm “behavior change” in the field. On a project-by-project basis all the stakeholders will have the opportunity to confirm behavior change as a result of training and each stakeholder would be provided guidelines for such documentation. We believe the recovery of project data including behavior change will allow us to predict damage based on observed behaviors in time to prevent damage.
APWA could be the logical forum for exploring this concept of a public/private “Damage Prevention Partnering Process” initiated on the basis of public safety. It is a concept worth exploring because it does not require legislative action and in the scheme of things the cost to any one party will be minimal and the ROI will be astronomical, especially if we can also protect the lives of the public in our rights-of-way.
Wayne Jensen can be reached at (727) 489-0593 or wayne.jensen@ stahlinsurance.com.
