Between the Poles

Preventing damage to underground infrastructure in Denmark

Underground utilities and other infrastructure are a major cause of highway construction schedule and budget overruns. In addition to construction delays, damage to underground utilities during construction makes every construction project a potential disaster site with risk for workers and the public. Denmark has been one of the earliest adopters of a nation-wide collaborative system for sharing information about the location of underground infrastructure among stakeholders involved construction including network operators and contractors.

The Danish Register of Underground Cable Owners (LER) was launched to prevent accidental damages to underground utility cables and to lower administration costs in the construction sector. LER contains information on all companies and associations who own underground cables in Denmark. Since 2005, all companies performing underground construction activities are legally obligated to notify the register before the beginning of excavation. The LER register is owned and operated by the Danish Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency (SDFE). SDFE's mandate is to ensure that the interests of both network owners and cable owners construction contractors are being recognized and to ensure compliance with Danish national law.

I had the opportunity to chat with Jan Hjelmager, Danish Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency, about Danish initiatives to reduce underground utility damage.

The Danish national register of underground assets

LER is Denmark's national one call centre for the exchange of utility pipes and cable information between infrastructure owners and contractors in order to prevent digging damages. The LER register provides information on location and which type of utilities that are located in the area where an excavation is planned. LER stores geographical data that show the service territories of utilities and telecoms operating in Denmark. Since 2005 all contractors are required contact LER prior to beginning excavations to request detailed utility pipe and cable location information in the area of the planned excavation. LER re-directs this request to relevant utility and telecom network owners.

In Denmark the information that the owners are expected to provide to contractors is defined by law. LER has recently undertaken a major system upgrade from LER 1.5 to LER 2.0 in order to support automatic exchange of utility pipe and cable information and display this information in a cross-platform map-viewer working both on- and offline. Implementation of the new standard began in January, 2020 and will be completed by July, 2023 when it will be mandatory for stakeholders to follow the LER 2.0 requirements. LER mandates a national exchange data model to ensure a consistent and high-quality dataset is provided by network owners showing the location of underground pipes and cables and related metadata. The system bears many similarities to the current systems in Flanders (KLIP) and the Netherlands (KLIC), especially in the use an information exchange data model and providing network location information digitally. In version 1 of LER there were no specifications as to how the data was to be provided, but in LER 2.0 both format and content are specified. These include that the data must be in vector-format and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) GML standard must be used. Currently the legislation does not specify data quality requirements, but after July 2023 there will be data accuracy requirements depending on whether underground assets are old or new.

In Denmark there has been no national system for recording incidents of damage to underground infrastructure, but that has changed with the upgrade to LER 2.0. Beginning in February, 2021 it will be mandatory for network owners to report all incidents of underground damage to LER at least once a year. For each incident, type of utility and owner, fatalities, injuries, and cost of the damage must be reported. This information will be used internally by SDFE to monitor the impact of new LER developments and also to assist LER in developing new initiatives target to reduce the amount of digging accidents. It is expected that the real benefits of the new system will first begin to appear after July 2023 when the system is fully implemented.

This is an important national initiative involving legislation, regulation, and collaboration among stakeholders to address one of the chief causes construction delays, cost overruns and injuries to workers and the public.  The Danish LER system addresses the challenge of sharing the location of underground infrastructure among stakeholders in construction and is an important component of a national approach to preventing damage to underground network infrastructure and to lower administration costs in the construction sector.

Latest statistics reveal little progress in reducing damage to underground infrastructure during construction

The primary objective of interventions such as one-call centres, pipeline safety and other regulations, and national programs such as ROADIC in Japan is the reduction of damage to underground infrastructure during excavation. Collecting reliable statistics make it possible to assess the effectiveness of policies, technologies and changes in business practices aimed at preventing and reducing the severity of underground utility damage incidents.

Background

While many jurisdictions have attempted to address the problem of damage to underground infrastructure during construction, reliable statistics remains a challenge for many jurisdictions. In North America the Common Ground Alliance (CGA) has been collecting voluntarily submitted statistics on underground utility damage in North America since 2003. For trends over time the Common Ground Alliance (CGA) breaks out incidents that are reported by "consistently reporting sources" which are sources that have reported incidents over multiple years. The ratio of this metric to a proxy for the annual amount of construction activity has revealed that number of incidents of damages per million dollars of construction spending (in 2017 constant dollars) has been increasing.

With respect to federally regulated gas and hazardous fluid pipelines In the U.S. it is mandatory to report incidents of pipeline damage to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Adinistration (PHMSA). PHMSA has implemented policies and regulations to improve pipeline safety. PHMSA’s statistics have not revealed a trend toward a reduction in pipeline incidents including those attributed to excavation damage.

Common Ground Alliance 2019 DIRT Report

The CGA has just released the 2019 DIRT Report.  The report found that damages to underground infrastructure during excavation are on the rise.The number of damage reports entered in the CGA's DIRT system reached an all-time high at 534,151. The estimate of total damages in the U.S. increased 4.5% year-over-year to 532,000.  A key metric relied on by the CGA to track temporal trends is ratio of damages to construction spending. The overall trend in this metric has been upward since 2015. In 2019 estimated damages were up 4.5% compared to 2018. It is suggested that the rise in damages may correlate with an increase in overall pressure on the damage prevention process.

For 2019 alone, the CGA has estimated that the societal costs of damages to buried utilities in the U.S. is $30 billion.This estimate accounts for direct costs (facility repair) and indirect costs (property damage, medical bills, businesses unable to operate, etc.).

Ontario Regional Common Ground Alliance 2019 DIRT Report

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.  Recently the ORCGA released the 2019 DIRT report for Ontario.

In Ontario industry practice is to measure damage prevention performance by the damage ratio metric which represents the number of damage incidents per thousand notifications. Notifications are tickets transmitted from Ontario One Call to underground infrastructure owners in response to a request from an excavator for locating underground facilities. Since 2014 the damage ratio has been gradually increasing. Due to a change in the Ontario One Call process in 2018, notifications in 2019 decreased which affected the damage ratio.

In response to the Ontario One Call process changes, a chart was created to show a new metric, the damage to request ratio, which shows the number of damage incidents per 1000 requests.  A request is a communication from an excavator, typically via Ontario One Call, for locating underground facilities.  Since 2018 this ratio has slowly decreased.

KLIC system in the Netherlands

The Netherlands has had what in North America is called a one call system since 1967. The objective of the KLIC system is to prevent damages to the utility network and to ensure the safety of excavators during excavations. In 2010 the Netherlands switched to an online digital information system (KLIC-Online) that reduced the turnaround time for locate requests to less than 24 hours. 

In the Netherlands network operators are required to report all incidents of damage to their infrastructure including location, cause and other information.  Based on this and other information the Dutch Telecom Agency (Agentschap Telecom) issues an annual report with statistics on underground utility damage in the Netherlands. The metric comparing the number of requests for location information from excavators (blue bars) to the number of incidents of damage during excavation (red line) shows that this ratio has remained constant since 2015.

Conclusion

The latest statistics from the CGA, ORCGA and the KLIC system confirm what has been seen in previous years.  The trend in damage to underground infrastructure prorated to construction activity is flat or even increasing. The CGA's estimate of the impact of underground damage on the U.S. economy of $30 billion annually makes it clear what the economic benefits of a more comprehensive approach to reducing damage to underground infrastructure could be.

Ofwat mandates game changer by making water utilities responsible for 3rd party damage to infrastructure

The recent PR19 comprehensive price review of the water industry by Ofwat, the economic regulator of the water sector in England and Wales has targeted an aggressive "reducing leakage by 15% within base costs" and provides financial motivation to water industry to improve the quality of its asset data.  This has been motivated by Ofwat's observation that "over the past two decades, despite material technological progress, the sector has achieved little overall reduction in leakage" 

Currently water utilities suffer financial penalties for customer lost minutes from failure of the company’s assets or unplanned interruptions. PR19 extends financial penalties for water companies to cover failures caused by third parties.  This is a game changer  for how the water sector operates because it provides strong financial motivation to water utilities to reduce damage during 3rd party excavation.  As Richard Broome of LinesearchBeforeUDig (LSBUD) put it in a recent article in WWT,  "One area of particular focus with PR19 is asset resilience ... It now treats asset failures caused by third parties in the same way as any other failure of the company’s assets or unplanned interruptions, and the financial penalties that result from customer lost minutes can be considerable."

The implications of this regulatory ruling is that water companies will be financially motivated to increase investment in improving the quality of their location and other data for their underground network assets.  They will also be motivated to find ways to make this data accessible to excavators, possibly through Digdat (Anglian Water Services) , LSBUD, or another sharing service.  Water utilities will need to address the issue of ensuring reliable as-builts are captured for newly installed water assets.  They will also need to find ways to improve the quality of their location data for existing assets, which is a major challenge because some water assets were put in the ground in the 17th Century.