In a previous blog I noted that in Florida when locating underground utilities in response to a notification of intention to excavate network owners are only required to paint or otherwise mark the ground. The legislation does not require a written record. In Ontario a written record is required in addition to marking the ground. At the federal level in Canada there is legislation initiated in the Senate and now before the House of Commons that offers the alternative of the exchange of only a written record of the location of utilities mapped prior to excavation - no visit to the site to mark the ground is required. This would open the door to exchanging a digital record of the location of utilities found prior to excavation which would be much more efficient because it could obviate the need to visit the site of the proposed excavation.
Professional Surveyors Canada working group on underground infrastructure
In its report on the state of our knowledge about the location of underground infrastructure in Canada, the Professional Surveyors Canada working group concluded that underground infrastructure in Canada is often not surveyed or mapped accurately, if at all. Currently the systems in Canada dealing with underground infrastructure are a patchwork of regulatory and voluntary regimes. They range from the City of Edmonton which maintains a database of underground infrastructure and the City of Calgary that mandates that information about underground infrastructure be shared among utilities and communications firms operating within city limits, through to one-call centres operating in the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec, to other provinces and territories where there is no one-call centre leaving it up to construction contractors to identify and contact utilities and communications companies before they excavate. The Professional Surveyors Canada working group is very clear about the problems with the current regulatory regimes and business practices in Canada; creates loss of use situations to critical infrastructure such as telecommunications; creates hazards for workers; creates inefficiencies in locates for customers; reduces efficiencies and productivity of one call systems; increases cost for new development; increases cost for each new installation of underground infrastructure; greatly increases the amount of redundant locates being done; increases risk to the public; and increases risk to the environment.
Example of a provincial one-call centre
Ontario One Call is an example of a one-call centre currently operating in Canada. In Ontario every municipality, utility, communications company and others with underground infrastructure are required to become members of Ontario One Call which is a not-for-profit corporation. All members are required to provide Ontario One Call with information that describes where the member has underground infrastructure. This typically takes the form of maps showing service territories, and not necessarily maps showing the actual location of underground networks. Anyone planning to excavate within the province is required to contact the one-call centre which is responsible for identifying and contacting all of its members that may have infrastructure in or near the area of the planned excavation. Upon being notified of an excavation potentially affecting its infrastructure each member is required (at no cost to the excavator) to locate any infrastructure it may have that would be impacted by the planned excavation. An important effect of this legislation is that each utility and communications operators maintains a fleet of field staff with vans and locate equipment or contracts a locate service to provide the service. For a utility operating in a medium-sized city this can easily amount to something on the order of a million dollars annually.
In Ontario a utility operator is required to mark on the ground the location of its underground infrastructure and provide a written document containing information describing the location of the underground infrastructure. This differs from many state one-call centres in the U.S. where a written document is not required.
Senate Bill S-229 An Act respecting underground infrastructure safety
At the federal level Senate Bill S-229, which was introduced in 2015, passed third reading in the Senate in May 2017 and is awaiting consideration by the House of Commons, is ground-breaking in that it opens the door to a digital underground locating system similar to those operating in the Netherlands and Belgium. Bill S-229 aims to create a federal underground infrastructure notification system (federal one-call centre) that requires operators of underground infrastructure that is federally regulated or that is located on federal land to register their underground infrastructure with a federal one-call centre. It is similar in many respects to the legislation creating Ontario One Call, but has some important differences. All members must provide a description of the geographical location of the underground infrastructure "such as the digital geospatial data or legal description of the location." Anyone excavating on Federal land tis required o contact the one-call centre prior to beginning excavation. In response to a notification of intention to excavate operators are required to either
mark the location of their infrastructure on the ground and provide accurate and clear descriptions of the location of the underground infrastructure in written form to the excavator
or
provide accurate and clear descriptions of the location of the underground infrastructure in written form to the excavator.
The important difference between the Ontario One Call and Bill S-229 legislation is that the latter opens the door to a digital system (similar to the Dutch KLIC and Belgian KLIP) that does not require an operator to actually visit planned excavation sites. This enables operators with accurate maps of their underground infrastructure to reduce the costs associated with locate operations.
Challenges
While the proposed federal legislation is a step forward, there remain two areas that it does not address. The first is that the quality of the information about the location of underground utilities maintained by many operators is low. To begin improving this information requires some mechanism for sharing of the results of on-site locates - potentially by uploading the location of underground infrastructure in digital form to a shared database. Secondly, it also requires sharing the location information about underground infrastructure exposed during excavation.
To begin to address these issues the Professional Surveyors Canada report recommends requiring that all new underground infrastructure be surveyed and mapped in 3D with high precision and reliability and sharing basic information on the type, location and depth of underground infrastructure in a standardized form through a common, accessible system. Furthermore, all underground infrastructure surveyed should be in a common format that can update a master map/GIS data set. Such a master database would limit visibility of networks in such a way that sensitive information would not be accessible to competitors (especially important for communications firms) or to others for privacy or security reasons.
A major challenge in the Professional Surveyors Canada proposal is finding a way of capturing information about the location of underground utilities accurately and efficiently without impacting construction budgets and schedules. Modern technology offers ways of reality capture that are accurate and efficient. Experiments have shown that modern geoprocessing in the cloud makes it possible to capture the required location information about underground utilities with mobile LiDAR, ground penetrating radar (GPR), combined mobile LiDAR and GPR, consumer digital cameras or smart phones obviating the need for professional surveyors to actually be onsite. This would reduce the impact on construction budgets and schedules.
Other issues are organizational; who is responsible for hosting the database - an enhanced one-call centre, a non-profit, public-private partnership, or some other organization; how it is to be financed - by the operators or by charging excavators a fee; and data visibility and security - ensuring that visibility is rigourously controlled.
Many thanks to David Gariepy for pointing me to the Professional Surveyors Canada report UNDERGROUND INFRASTRUCTURE IN CANADA Moving toward a more responsible and responsive system on underground infrastructure.
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