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Common Ground Alliance: 2017 DIRT Report & Interactive Dashboard Released

By Erin Kurilla posted 10-04-2018 09:35 AM

  
Each year, the Common Ground Alliance provides a report summarizing the submitted data and analyzing the events of that year. The 2017 Damage Information Reporting Tool (DIRT) Report was recently published. Highlights from this year’s report include:

• Estimated damages have increased year-over-year from 2015 to 2016 and 2016 to 2017, but when construction spending and outbound locate transmissions are considered, damage rates have effectively remained stable during this three-year span.

• Most reported damages (52 percent) are the result of Insufficient Excavation Practices. Approximately a quarter of the damages (24 percent) resulted from Notification Not Made to the One Call Center, and approximately 17 percent are due to locating issues.

• The leading type of excavator involved in damages is Contractor at about 61 percent. Occupants and Farmers make up about 5 percent. For reports where a root cause is provided, 78 percent involving Occupants with hand tools are due to No Notification to the One Call Center. For Contractors with backhoes, it’s about 21 percent due to No Notification to the One Call Center, with Excavating Practices making up about 43 percent.

• Reporting and analysis of when damages occur, by month and day of the week, which found:
o Damages that occurred on a weekend were nearly twice as likely to involve hand tools (shovels, post-hole diggers, etc.) than those on weekdays.
o 50 percent of all reported damages occurred between June and September in 2017.
o August was the month with the most total damages in 2017.

Additionally, CGA has updated the DIRT Interactive Dashboard, which allows for users to apply a variety of filters to the data, including sorting by state, root causes, facility type, type of excavation, etc.

For questions on this article, please contact Erin Kurilla of APGA staff by phone at 202-464-2742 or by email at ekurilla@apga.org.

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