The damage prevention industry has spent years asking the same questions:
How do we reduce damages?
How do we improve locate performance?
How do we achieve damage reduction goals like CGA’s 50 in 5?
In a recent episode of the Irth Podcast, host Jason Adams talks with Ron Peterson, executive director of the National Utility Locating Contractors Association (NULCA), and a different question surfaced:
What if the real issue is that the system is doing exactly what it was designed to do, just at a scale it was never built to handle?
Their conversation picked up where two articles NULCA published, calling “for structural reform in the 811 system,” left off. In those articles, NULCA takes accountability for the locating industry’s part in a broken system but also identifies the parts that other stakeholders in damage prevention, including one call centers, utilities, and contractors, need to own.
In damage prevention, “late locate” has become a familiar metric. They most often get framed as a performance problem. A locator didn’t show up. A company didn’t staff correctly. Someone dropped the ball.
But, by the time a locate is marked late, a cascade of decisions may have already occurred upstream that created problems with the locate request itself:
The delay in the locate at the end of the process may have started long before the locate technician ever received the ticket.
In one dataset NULCA reviewed, a single ticket covered the equivalent of more than 8,000 football fields. One ticket. And they still only had 48 hours to complete the ticket; the same time as an 811 ticket to mark a residential backyard.
While software could flag oversized tickets, screen for scope creep, and alert on anomalies before the locate crew gets buried, you’re only fixing the ticket, not the system that created it.
If the only question the industry asks is, “Was the locate on time?” we risk the far more important question: Was the work request executable in the first place?
Peterson said in its research, NULCA found that one gas utility reported 30% of the tickets it received represented unnecessary work, such as tickets for areas where no excavation would happen and non-emergencies that were called emergencies.
Similarly, tickets with generic instructions, such as “locate all main and service lines on entire property plus 25 feet on either side,” appeared on 30 tickets for the same excavator. The actual excavation was a standard trench from the structure to the curb, which would take about 20 minutes. However, the instructions turned each one into a 40-minute locate. Multiply that across 30 tickets, and nearly 10 hours of field time is consumed on work that was never going to happen.
Cleaning up this waste changes the math dramatically for locators. Take 30% off any workload in any industry, and suddenly you’re staffed and on-time performance looks very different.
Locating companies can’t staff for demand they can’t see coming.
Training a locating technician to full competence takes four to six months minimum. You can’t hire someone on a Tuesday because fiber construction showed up in your territory on Monday. But that’s exactly what happens — repeatedly — when large infrastructure projects break ground without meaningful advance notice to locating companies.
Federal broadband funding announcements are public record. Construction schedules exist. The information isn’t secret; it’s just not being shared with the parties who need it most.
If demand forecasting is invisible, performance challenges become almost inevitable.
What would happen if every damage prevention stakeholder sat down — excavators, locators, utilities, one call centers, regulators, technology providers — and asked a simple question:
If we were building damage prevention from scratch today, what would we design differently?
In the podcast, Peterson pointed to Alberta’s alternative locate process. To Australia’s national mapping initiative. To the work being done in Arizona and Missouri on project-tier tickets and volume awareness.
An industry-wide conversation that starts from scratch wouldn’t be constrained by legacy assumptions. It would be a real systems-level discussion, not another layer of band-aids trying to correct a system designed for a million tickets a year, but is now processing 265 million.
That conversation may be uncomfortable. It may challenge long-held assumptions. It may expose flaws across every stakeholder group.
But if the industry’s goals are serious — whether 50% reduction targets, safer excavation, or long-term resilience — those conversations are overdue.
Tune in to the full podcast episode today to learn more about how all damage prevention stakeholders can take accountability and work together to achieve our collective goals.