Another Year of Cost and Loss?

In 2019, the Common Ground Alliance estimated that the U.S. experienced approximately 532,000 damage events to underground facilities. That was the highest year on record and coincided with an estimated $30 billion in annual economic harm. Subsequently, the Infrastructure Protection Coalition studied the 811 one-call system and found that the processes set up to facilitate damage prevention contribute to an additional $60 billion in economic waste and inefficiency. All told, somewhere on the order of $100 billion is needlessly forfeit in the U.S. every year. 

Heading into 2023, that story is destined to repeat – unless or until systemic reforms are adopted. Every individual utility owner/operator, every locate business, every excavator, and the peripheral network of damage prevention stakeholders broadly must begin to take action to deploy known and proven technology, adhere to best practices, and report the highest quality data available when incidents do occur. The starting point would be two of the technologies most heralded by CGA itself all the way up to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). 

In 2017, following a request from Congress, PHMSA completed a study on improving damage prevention technology. It returned with recommendations that chiefly included electronic white-lining and enhanced positive response. Perhaps not coincidentally, by 2021, CGA issued its then-latest Technology Report stating that the ideal dig of the future would start with electronic white-lining and enhanced positive response as the very first steps. These technologies, when utilized together, all but guarantee over a two-thirds reduction in excavation damage incidents. 

When we set our eyes ahead once more, we can only assess 2023 in light of what we know of the recent past. Just this past fall, CGA issued its annual Damage Information Reporting Tool (DIRT) report, in which it concludes that damages in 2021 slightly increased from 2019 levels. In other words, for the last year that data is available, damages were at a new all-time high. With it must logically include new heights in damage costs and system inefficiencies. 

The grim – but not yet foregone – conclusion then, is that 2023 will see over $100 billion in economic harm, waste, loss, and inefficiency from the damage prevention sector. The trend from recent years does not have to predict the future. In fact, it will be years before we know definitively what happened in the utility sector in 2023 when the next available data is released. In that time, stakeholders and policymakers can all work together to prevent damage, implement technologies and best practices, and avoid becoming another data point in a stubborn trend of rising excavation damage.