According to a recent report from the Next Practices Initiative of the Common Ground Alliance the damage prevention industry has reached an inflection point. For more than half a decade, the rate of damage to underground infrastructure in the U.S.has increased or remained stagnant. The hundreds of thousands of individual damages that occur across the country each year cost the national economy approximately $30 billion annually according the the CGA 2019 DIRT report. . This includes direct costs (facility repair) and indirect costs (property damage, medical costs, loss of custom, disruption to services, and others) but does not include environmental and social impacts.
The one call system has become highly inefficient and industry confidence in the system has been eroded, resulting in a process that has stalled and is not achieving its primary goal of reducing damage to underground infrastructure. The Infrastructure Protection Coalition estimates that $61 billion in waste, inefficiency, and excess cost is embedded in the current system - this is in addition to the $30 billion cost of damage estimated by the CGA.
The CGA Next Practices Report to Industry argues that among the opportunities for systemic improvement with greatest ROI for industry is a comprehensive national GIS map of buried infrastructure. The Next Practices Pathways Status Report Report makes the case that the impacts of unreliable and inaccessible facility maps on the construction process are great and specifically identifies planning and design without reliable underground facility maps which results in redesigns in the midst of the project, unnecessary and expensive locate request and utility relocations, and higher risk of underground damage. Inaccurate, out of date or simply missing data also make the locating process more time consuming and more uncertain than necessary. Furthermore, making facility maps accessible to all project stakeholders especially excavators would have significant benefits especially in improving job site safety.
The CGA report identifies barriers to creating and maintaining reliable facility maps and making these accessible to all construction stakeholders. However, recent experience and new developments have demonstrated and are demonstrating that these barriers are surmountable.
Chief among the barriers identified by the CGA is the lack of the political will to share information. For a variety of reasons including competitive, security and liability issues there is industry resistance to sharing facility location information with other stakeholders. The National Underground Asset Register (NUAR) project in the UK has shown that these issues are surmountable and industry can become convinced of the significant positive benefits of sharing reliable information in a secure environment with the appropriate data protection measures. For this project the high standard of data security and data protection enabled network owners to fell comfortable in agreeing on a legal framework for data sharing in which each network owner remained the custodian of its own data. This provides for clear accountability chains in terms of ownership, governance and regulation.
Another barrier is the lack of a centralized, trusted organization capable of being responsible for a national GIS underground infrastructure database. It must be able to operate and maintain a secure centralized or distributed database accessible to all construction stakeholders with data protection capabilities that is able to ensure all data custodians that their data is safe and protected. Historically different organizational structures have been successfully used to achieve this goal, including government mandated organizations (DT DICT system in France), voluntary collaborations between industry and government (Vault system in Scotland), industry associations(ICI Society in British Columbia), and others.
On the technical side a barrier is a lack of commonly agreed standards for seamlessly and automatically sharing GIS facility location data across organizations and jurisdictions on a common base map. The ASCE 38 standard for existing infrastructure has been available since 2002 and a new, greatly updated version is imminent, the new ASCE 75 standard for as-builts will be released soon. Both of these standards have been mandated for construction in the public right of way in Colorado. The Open Geospatial Consortium's emerging MUDDI standard for exchanging underground infrastructure infrastructure (which is compatible with ASCE 38 and 75) is already being used on the NUAR project in the UK and the UNUM project in New York.City.
The CGA Next Practices Initiative makes a strong case that a centralized national map of underground infrastructure accessible all construction stakeholders provides systemic benefits with a large ROI for the construction industry. Recent developments have demonstrated and are demonstrating that the barriers to implementing such a system are surmountable suggesting that a centralized national map of underground infrastructure is feasible and would provide important economic and social benefits. For contractors a national map would reduce the risk of underground utility strikes during construction and result in more on time and on budget completions. It would also make job sites safer and reduce the risk of injuries and fatalities for construction workers and the public. In the longer term it would reduce insurance costs which for the historically low margin contractor sector is an important economic benefit. For engineers and designers it means knowing the accurate location of underground and above ground infrastructure during planning and design and avoiding redesigns. For surveyors it represents increased demand for survey grade location accuracy for underground utilities and other infrastructure. For network operators it would reduce the frequency of outages, eliminate unnecessary and expensive relocations, reduce liabilities, and lower the cost of supporting locate operations in response to one call notifications. For government transportation agencies it would reduce the cost of public construction projects, reduce delays and deliver more on time completions. For the public it would mean fewer service interruptions and less risk of traffic and other disruptions. For the locate industry it would represent a large opportunity to accurately locate and record location data for the millions of miles of existing underground infrastructure. To do this efficiently will require new and innovative technology for locating existing underground infrastructure, capturing the location of newly installed network facilities, and recording and sharing underground infrastructure information.
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