The ORCGA has just released the 2020 Damage Information Reporting Tool (DIRT) Report.  The report is the result of the efforts made by the ORCGA to collect and compile data about the occurrence of events of underground damage in Ontario. The annual DIRT Report provides a summary and analysis of the known events submitted during the previous year and it also provides the ability to monitor trends over time. The 2020 report focuses on the data gathered throughout Ontario during the three-year period between 2018 and 2020.

In Ontario industry practice is to measure damage prevention performance by the damage ratio metric which represents the number of damage incidents per thousand notifications. Notifications are tickets transmitted from Ontario One Call to underground infrastructure owners in response to a request from an excavator for locating underground facilities. Since 2014 the damage ratio has been gradually increasing. Due to a change in the Ontario One Call process in 2018, notifications in 2019 decreased which affected the damage ratio.

In response to the Ontario One Call process changes, a chart was created to show a new metric, the damage to request ratio, which shows the number of damage incidents per 1000 requests.  A request is a communication from an excavator, typically via Ontario One Call, requesting locate services.  Since 2018 this ratio has slowly decreased, approaching the value it attained in 2014.

Although the volume of damages in Ontario went down in 2020, without some measure of construction activity it is difficult to assign this decrease to a particular cause, for example, reduced construction activity during the pandemic.

Damage statistics (CGA, PHMSA, ORCGA) reveal that underground damage across North America and in the Netherlands (KLIC) plateaued several years ago and may actually be slowly increasing when prorated to construction activity (CGA).  An exception to this trend is the DC DICT system implemented in France where damage statistics reveal a downward trend in the amount of underground utility damage since 2013. Although the number of DTs (requests) submitted is growing every year, the trend in underground utility damage is decreasing, currently by 2 % per year.