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Reducing NC one call's false ticketing

Robert A. Popoff
GeoForce
(A subsidiary of Lost Time Control West, Inc.)
12446 Willingdon Road
Huntersville, NC 28078


Paper

Definitions
  1. Excavation
    An operation for the purpose of the movement or removal of earth, rock, or other materials in or on the ground by use of equipment operated by means of mechanical power and/or an operation by which a structure or mass of material is wrecked, razed, moved, or removed by means of any tools, equipment, or discharge of explosives. This term includes road construction, but does not include road maintenance activities within rights-of-way of a highway, including those maintenance activities defined by the rules and regulations of the North Carolina Department of Transportation.


  2. Person
    A corporation, individual, partnership, company, association, or any combination of individuals or organizations doing business as a unit; any subdivision instrumentality of the State, and including any officer, agent, trustee, receiver, assignee, lessee, or personal representative of any of the above entities.


  3. Association
    A non-profit organization sponsored by the utility owners that will provide receipt of notification of excavation operations in a defined geographical area, and will maintain the records of the notification.


  4. Damage
    Term used to describe substantial weakening of structural or lateral support of an underground utility, penetration or destruction of protective coating, housing, or other protective device of an underground utility, and the partial or complete severance of an underground utility.


  5. Underground Utility
    Any underground line, system, or facility used for the producing, storing, conveying, transmitting, or distributing communications or telecommunications, electricity, gas, petroleum or petroleum products, coal slurry, hazardous liquids, water under pressure, steam, or sanitary sewage, but not including traffic signal control cables and vehicle detection cables of the North Carolina Department of Transportation.


  6. Member
    The Utilities, Coops and Municipalities that support NC One Call and have underground facilities. NC One Call members include: AT&T, Utiliquest, Colonial Pipeline, Duke Energy, Prestige Cable, MCI, Alltel, NC Natural Gas, Plantation Pipeline, Piedmont Natural Gas, ICG Telecom Group, PSNC Energy, BellSouth, Time Warner, Williams Pipeline, Sprint, UUL, Worldcom Network Services, Cresent EMC, TCG of the Carolinas, VMAC, ICX Communications, Qwest, CP&L, and local utilities.


  7. Overlay Grid
    A non-standard area grid system employed by NC One Call. This grid does not necessarily correspond with any grid system maintained by association members.


  8. Gridlet
    A subset of the Overlay grid designed to improve the accuracy of member facility locates and subsequent locate ticketing.


  9. Offset
    The distance which member companies measure off from it's assumed underground facilities to make certain the difference in positional accuracy from the members and NC One Call is compensated for when tagging grids.


  10. Ticket
    A document generated by NC One Call notifying a member utility of excavation near a member utility's facilities.


  11. Marking, Painting or Coloring
    The result of a ticket, indicating where underground facilities are located by marking, painting, or coloring ground, vegetation, and/or road surfaces. The color of the paint indicates what type of facilities are underground such as Gas, Water, Electric, Cable, and Telecom.
History

In response to the massive growth of infrastructure excavation in the State of North Carolina, the State Senate passed Bill 168 in the session of 1985, which defined and mandated standards for safe compliance of all installations in North Carolina. This bill was in response to the large number of litigations that were taking place when developers were removing earth and damaging underground facilities. While this bill set forth standards for developers to follow, it also brought about certain responsibilities for the utilities. Highlights of the Bill include:

87-107 (Duties of the Utility Owner):
Each utility owner, or his designated representative including an association, notified of an intent to excavate shall, before the proposed start of excavating, provide the following to the person excavating to the extent such information reflected by records in the possession of and reasonably available to the facility owner:
  1. The location and description of all of the underground utilities which may be damaged as a result of the excavation;
  2. The location and description of all utility markers indicating the location of the underground utilities; and
  3. Any other information that would assist in the locating and avoiding damage to the underground utilities, including providing temporary marking when necessary indicating the location of underground utility in locations where permanent utility markers do not exist.
In addition and more important, from section 87-108 (Absence of Utility Location):

Should any utility owner who has been given notice pursuant to G. S. 87-102 i.e. Notice Prior to Excavation, fail to respond to that notice as provided in G. S. 87-107, or fail to locate the underground utility, then the person excavating is free to proceed with the excavation. Neither the excavator nor the person financially responsible for the excavation will be liable to the non-responding or improperly responding utility owner for damages to that utility owner's facilities if the person doing the excavating shall exercise due care to protect existing underground utilities when there is evidence of the existence of those underground utilities near the proposed excavation site.

As a result of this bill, the utilities of the State of North Carolina formed an association called ULOCO, now known as NC One Call.

History of NC One Call

Located in Greensboro, North Carolina, NC One Call was created by the utility members of the State of North Carolina. Maintaining a simple database, NC One Call each year keeps track of what utilities have underground facilities in a geographic area by county. This database was developed and implemented to simply comply with state law and has proved to be of little value to the association members due to the number of false tickets issued.

NC One Call is a member of National Joint Utilities Notification System (NJUNS). NJUNS is a national organization of member utilities formed for the purpose of improving the coordination of joint ventures. Their systems offer utility companies a method of obtaining up-to-date information on a variety of shared concerns, including pole transfers, joint trenching and permits for new attachments to poles.

In 1994, NC One Call designed a grid system based on square ¼ mile cells across the entire state.



Each year, each member utility would overlay their GIS or paper maps with this grid and mark which grids they had facilities in. Based on the confidence level of the positional accuracy of facilities, the adjoining grids were usually also identified. The grids were then sent to NC One Call ,which entered this information into its database.

When excavation project calls were placed to NC One Call, "dig boxes" were drawn around the location of the excavation project. All grids touching the "dig box" were highlighted. An automated ticket was then generated for each utility that indicated a member utility had facilities inside or near that grid. This process worked better than the previous method of county notification, but was still deemed as costly and inefficient.

PSNC Energy, as an example, dedicated one technician for 2 full months each year to marking grids with underground facilities and surrounding grids for safety. NC One Call dedicated a full time staff member to enter and maintain its database containing all the member utilities grid and facility information. As member utility personnel involved in facility location became more familiar with the location of its own infrastructure in a given area numerous issued tickets were discarded by personnel who were knowledgeable that no facilities existed at that location.

These high costs and inefficiencies led to the need for a new, more accurate system that allowed member utilities to take advantage of GIS systems to communicate with NC One Call. The driving business need was to replace the manual technique of marking grids and reduce the number of false tickets generated. The inefficiencies and related costs of the existing system and business process were presented to the board in 1999. Documented below are the issues presented:
  • ¼ mile grids were determined to be too large, causing many false tickets to be generated.
  • Due to the vast number of false tickets, personnel who were well versed where facilities existed simply discarded them before notifying the crews. This caused a greater problem when inexperienced personnel assumed this job function.
  • The man-hours required to tag grids were labor intensive and cost prohibitive for both members and NC One Call.
  • There was no way to link the ticket back to a GIS if the field office did not have access to a GIS.
Recommendations
In January 2000, NC One Call was called upon by its Board of Directors to find ways of reducing the number of false tickets being submitted to its members. Metropolitan growth in North Carolina was putting a strain on older systems, which in turn was causing inefficiencies for its member utilities. The Director of NC One Call requested the input from a number of major utilities such as PSNC Energy (a SCANA Corporation), Duke Energy, Carolina Power and Light, BellSouth, Sprint and GIS consultants contracted the respective member utilities, forming a committee to research what actions could be taken to improve the system.

The major objective of this committee was to reduce the number of false tickets being submitted, reduce the workload at NC One Call, and reduce the workload for the field personnel of member utilities. A secondary objective of the committee was to reduce the man-hours to prepare information for NC One Call on an annual basis. Finally, the third objective was to increase the accuracy of the data being maintained at NC One Call.

It was agreed upon that the following objectives needed to be met:
  1. Change from a ¼ mile grid to a ¼ minute grid.
  2. Provide the option of reducing the grid from ¼ minute to 3 second gridlet (25 gridlets per grid).
  3. Provide a way to use GIS to determine what grids need to be tagged.
  4. Implement an electronic tagging process to minimize human error.
  5. Allow a variable offset for each area to take advantage of a more accurate and complete land base. (Since most members were relatively accurate to a landbase and not positionally accurate to their facilities, long-term recommendations of each member using a single landbase would be visited later.)
  6. Develop a mechanism to link tickets back to a GIS for field personnel.
Implementation
In year 2000, NC One Call implemented the Quickmaps/GS 2000 product.



This product reduced the grid size from ¼ mile grids, to ¼ minute grids, and 3 second gridlets. By reducing the size of the grid, the number false tickets should be reduced by 65-70%.

As time approached for the receipt of member facilities by electronic means, NC One Call requested that member utilities generate dynamically buffered polygons around their underground facilities. The QuickMaps/GS 2000 system was flexible enough to handle different buffers based on member's confidence in accuracy of their GIS facility data. Concerns were raised by many members on the project team that the QuickMaps/GS 2000 software would not be able to handle polygons from each member and still be as responsive as NC One Call needed it to be. After months of testing, NC One Call agreed to accept linear segments only and tag their new gridlets based on the segments generated by the members.

PSNC Energy and Duke Energy, both having GIS systems on the same platform and data stored in the same coordinate system, joined together to develop an application that would allow a technician to simply select the area they wanted to report to NC One Call. The application, written in Microsoft VB, took each coordinate of the underground facilities and created a projection file which NC One Call's new QuickMaps/GS 2000 System could recognize.





This VB application allows the operator to select:
  • What Type of GIS they are using
  • What Area Number they are extracting from
  • What offset they want to use
  • The units of the Offset either in Feet or Meters
  • What Feature in GIS to select from
  • What Geometric Attribute to use
  • The Electronic File Name to create
  • The Email Address to Electronically send the file to
  • Send facility data at any interval the member wants, instead of on an annual basis only. Also, it is simple enough to use that a novice operator can use it, freeing up the GIS Power user from other purposes.
Finally, a Viewing Application was selected by PSNC Energy to provide a means for the field offices to tie the tickets back to GIS without having to have a GIS License.

This viewer, developed using ESRI's MapObjects software, enables PSNC Energy to provide facility data on CD to the entire company on a routine basis. Standard viewing functions allow the operator to quickly locate the ticket area to determine if facilities exist. This can be done by zooming, panning, or querying a street or address, and going to that area.



Whats Next
With the implementation of the interfaces for the NC Carolina One Call system, the members are now focusing on if their objectives were met.
  • The number of members implementing the new guidelines to date has only been 20. Disappointing, but as the technology advancements spread, so too should the number of members taking advantage of these advancements.
  • PSNC Energy was at the forefront of this project. Their testing and prototyping was soon followed up by Duke Energy. NC One Call, once receiving all the underground facility segments, is now able to return a geographical representation of the gridlets throughout the entire State of North Carolina, allowing the member to view the results of the electronic transfer of data.
  • The intitial results has of the implementation has been a reduction in the number of man hours for PSNC Energy from 2 months to 2 weeks. The reduction in the number of false ticketing is not known at the time of this paper, but hopes continue to reduce it by 60%.
  • The next step for PSNC will be electronic ticketing by assigning an employee's email address for each reporting area in their franchise territory. NC One Call, once generating a ticket for this area, will email an electronic ticket directly to the employee, reducing the response time by days.
  • NC One Call and their members are in the process of applying for federal grants to expand their technology and service, staying at the forefront of damage prevention.
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