Statistics on incidents of underground utility damage from the Ontario Regional Common Ground Alliance (ORCGA) 2018 DIRT report reveals a trend since 2014 of increasing utility damage suggesting that new measures are required to drive this statistic downward.
Context
Reliable metrics provide a foundation for assessing the social and economic impact of incidents and the effectiveness of new technologies and policies in preventing and reducing the severity of these incidents. The commercial airline industry is a model of what reliable statistics and data for incidents and policies and technologies designed to reduce these incidents can achieve. Fatal accidents per million flights in 2018 have decreased 16 fold since 1970, from 6.35 to 0.39, and fatalities per trillion revenue passenger kilometers (RPK) decreased 54 fold from 3,218 to 59 in 2018.
A number of jurisdictions for which statistics are available and which have implemented partial measures to reduce incidents of underground including the Netherlands and the U.S. reveal no evidence of a reduction in the number of annual incidents. There are only two jurisdictions where statistics reveal a reduction in annual incidents, Japan and Heathrow International Airport. In both cases a multi-faceted approach including policies, regulation, changes to business practices, and new technologies have been applied to effect the reduction in the number and severity of incidents.
Underground utility damage in Ontario
The Ontario Regional Common Ground Alliance (ORCGA) has been collecting voluntarily submitted data on underground damage incidents since 2005.While some would argue that this represents only 50% of actual incidents, this is the best compilation of data on underground utility damage in Ontario. It is relied on by Ontario One Call for measuring performance toward its legislated goal of reducing underground utility damage (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018).
The key metrics that are used by ORCGA and Ontario One Call are number of incidents per notifications and number of incidents per information requests. Requests are to Ontario One Call and originate from excavators planning to dig. Notifications go to network operators originating from Ontario One Call in response to requests.
The damage ratio for number of incidents per 1000 notifications since 2007 reveals a decreasing trend through 2014. Since then the trend has been gradually increasing. Similarly the trend in the number of incidents per 1000 requests also decreased from 2009 through 2014, but the trend has been increasing since 2014. The 2018 damage to request ratio shows a decrease apparently reversing an upward trend from 2014. This is the result of a change in Ontario One Call process which reduced notifications by 10%.
This trend suggests that a more comprehensive approach to safety including regulation, policies and technologies is required to begin to bring the annual number of incidents down. I have identified 16 elements that can contribute to reducing the number of incidents of underground utility damage.
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