The Common Ground Alliance (CGA) is perhaps the most aptly named organization in human history.
The national nonprofit consists of stakeholders from 16 groups – including contractors, excavators, and utility locators – who share a vested interest – common ground – in mitigating damage to buried utilities.
Unfortunately, damage to buried utilities is an all-too-common by product of excavation.
There were 213,792 unique instances of damage to buried utilities in the U.S. in 2022 alone, according to the CGA’s 2022 Damage Information Reporting Tool (DIRT). A regression analysis of consistent 2020-2022 datasets shows that damages are, at best, flat, but more likely increasing when accounting for economic factors. And the top six root causes driving nearly 76% of all damages to buried infrastructure have been consistent year-over-year – meaning contractors, excavators, and public and private utility locators are making the same mistakes again and again.
With the recent influx of federal infrastructure dollars from the bipartisan Federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA),there will be more opportunities for subsurface damage than ever before. So, it’s no surprise that the CGA made waves when it unveiled its “50 in 5” initiative in February 2023: a challenge to the damage prevention industry to cut damages to critical underground utilities in half by 2028.
While it’s still too early to truly gauge whether the initiative will be a success, the CGA is pleased with the response it has seen so far.
“Once we announced 50 in 5, it basically took on a life of its own,” CGA President & CEO, Sarah Magruder Lyle, told The Built World. “We have seen so many other associations and groups really grab that and say, ‘What can we do to do this?’ It’s gone from a, ‘Well, can we do it?’ to, ‘Yes we can, if we work together.’”
While 50% damage reduction in 5 years is a lofty goal, the CGA had an ace up its sleeve as it looked to sell this challenge to its stakeholders: It had already been achieved in one of the largest, and utility-dense cities in the country.
A New Day in the Windy City
The City of Chicago is one of only two cities to have their own 811 One-Call System (The other is New York City).
811 (also known as One Call) is the national call-before-you dig service. Since 2005, federal law has required contractors and excavators to call 811 prior to breaking ground, to obtain the approximate location of all public utilities within their intended dig area.
What sets 811 Chicago apart from its fellow 811 services is its project design review process, which establishes a foundation for safe excavation related to utility projects. According to a case study published by CGA, this process resulted in the city experiencing a 50% reduction in annual damages since 2017.
“811 Chicago’s damage prevention model is unique, and features aspects that other stakeholders may not be able to adopt within the current system in their state or region – namely enforcement authority and oversight of the OUC [Chicago’s Division of Infrastructure Management’s Office of Underground Coordination],” the CGA wrote in its case study. “But there are many aspects of 811 Chicago’s process that any stakeholder, regardless of local regulation, can incorporate into their damage prevention process.”
The Office of Underground Coordination (OUC) safeguards Chicago’s surface and subsurface infrastructure against damage from scheduled construction, installations, and maintenance tasks. This office includes 27 utility reviewers from both city agencies and private companies. Their role is to assess Information Retrieval (IR) and Existing Facility Protection (EFP) documents to evaluate how proposed activities might impact current infrastructure.
Any potential utility locating project in Chicago starts with a project design review, which the CGA says emphasizes collaboration and communication among project owners, engineers, and facility operators. As part of the review, project owners submit the location of the project, and the OUC sends them a utility atlas page that identifies the locations of most of the buried utilities in the vicinity of the project location.
“Facility operators sharing available mapping data of underground infrastructure with other stakeholders is key to the effectiveness of the review phase,” the CGA wrote. “With the maps, project owners can produce a final design that avoids existing facilities.”
The project owner is responsible for incorporating the information they’ve received from the utility atlas page into a revised project plan that avoids these existing utilities. This new plan is then resubmitted to OUC, which distributes the plan to its member utility owners, who review it to ensure that the new utility will not encroach upon their facility.
The project only receives approval once all members agree on the plans. If one of them requests changes to the plan, the project planners must make those changes before the project can move to the permitting phase.
“Projects approved by the OUC ensure a new facility’s potential impact on existing infrastructure is mitigated before the ground is broken,” the CGA wrote. “The OUC returns value to both utility owners and excavators by saving them costs associated with utility damages.”
Lyle told The Built World that when the CGA reviewed the data from 811 Chicago, what struck them was the open communication between stakeholders when it came to mapping subsurface utilities.
According to the CGA’s case study, one of the difference makers for Chicago 811 is dotMaps: the organization’s custom-built GIS mapping program that displays the location of OUC projects, permits, and dig tickets. Stakeholders can use dotMaps to research completed and upcoming infrastructure projects, project and utility owners can use the data to coordinate work, field crews can access the system to reference relevant information while on site, and public users can use it to understand utility projects ongoing in their neighborhoods.
“Five years ago, it was, ‘We can’t do that,’” Lyle said. “Now we have a lot of places that have shown us we can, and so that, to me, stuck out. Yes, we can provide access to mapping, and we can provide access to this information, and it actually does make the system better. They’ve shown that mapping tools work.”
– Sarah Magruder Lyle, Common Ground Alliance President & CEO on Chicago’s subsurface damage mitigation strategy
No One-Size-Fits-All Solution to Subsurface Damage
Patrick Lewis was nervous.
A contractor working for a large telecommunications company wanted to run fiber optic cable straight through the historic downtown district of the City of Monroe, Michigan. So, they paid a visit to Lewis, the city’s Director of Engineering and Public Services, to present their plan and receive a right-of-way permit for the work.
The good news was that Monroe, like Chicago, had taken the initiative to map its water, sanitary sewer, and storm sewer infrastructure in a GIS platform.
The bad news was that the contractor’s plans were nowhere near as accurate as what Chicago requires of project applicants.
“They gave me what could best be described as a fourth grader’s art project as a plan set…” Lewis said. “I said ‘stop.’ With them, we had to get more involved.”
Lewis and his three-person team spent roughly 12-15 hours over several days working with the contractor to refine their plan and ensure they didn’t strike any of the city’s buried utilities while installing the new fiber line.
“I’m happy to report that they didn’t hit anything,” he said.
A city like Monroe lacks the manpower or resources that a city like Chicago has at its disposal to review project plans and ensure safe excavation.
But perhaps more importantly, Lewis says small-to-medium-sized municipalities like Monroe – 9.05 square miles of land, and 20,000 residents – also lack the “political power” of a large city like Chi-Town, which is home to 2.665 million residents living across 231.6 square miles of land.
“A [contractor] should be required… to produce full topographic surveys and map out every utility [in their dig area],” Lewis said. “If I were to require that, now I have city council breathing down my neck asking why they got a call from a business owner saying that the internet company is trying to charge them $20,000 to get internet to their business, because they city is making them do full engineering drawings.
“[A big city like Chicago] is powerful enough and not worried about losing business in a place everybody wants to be. In a smaller city like Monroe…,” he continued. “We try to do our best to incentivize people to locate to the city, particularly in the downtown, but there’s a limit to that. I think if I were to take a very hardline stance, there’d be a political price to pay, and I probably wouldn’t get away with it…”
Several state highways run through Monroe, creating an additional layer of complexity when it comes to subsurface damage mitigation.
“I don’t see any of that utility information, or any of those permits,” Lewis said. “I only hear about them when they smoke something, one of our utilities. That’s not really so much a problem of we don’t know or can’t figure out how to find where [the buried utilities] are, it’s just that we don’t know where the work is occurring because other agencies are not necessarily sharing that information with us.”
Moving Forward: Is There Scalability Beyond Closed Urban Systems?
There are, of course, asterisks to be considered when looking to duplicate what Chicago has achieved in other parts of the country. Every city, town, village, etc. in the country has its own unique challenges and circumstances that need to be accounted for.
It’s also important to note that Chicago utilizes its project review process for utility projects, but damage to existing subsurface infrastructure can and does occur during other types of excavation, where it may be more difficult to ensure clear communication between all parties involved.
The CGA, however, sees these as problems that can and will be solved with today’s technology – not tomorrow’s.
“It is unbelievable that we are in 2024, and I can walk outside - and on my phone, I can have a dot of exactly where I am on the street – but I can’t figure out where all of the underground infrastructure is that is out there,” Lyle said. “…We have the technology, we don’t need to make new technology. We need to use the technology that we have.”
The CGA publishes an annual Damage Information Reporting Tool (DIRT) in which they analyze national subsurface damage trends and make recommendations based on this analysis. The most recent DIRT Report was released in September 2023. Here are some data highlights:
