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Wed March 01, 2023 - National Edition #7
Common Ground Alliance (CGA), the national nonprofit trade association dedicated to protecting underground utility lines, people who dig near them and their communities, issued its "50 in 5" industry challenge to stakeholders with a goal of reducing damages to critical underground utilities by 50 percent in five years.
According to CGA's Damage Information Reporting Tool (DIRT) Report, the annual rate of damages to buried infrastructure in the United States has remained stagnant for most of the last decade and costs the U.S. a staggering $30 billion every year.
Each of the hundreds of thousands of dig-ins to underground utilities that occurs annually has the potential to cripple communities and businesses by cutting them off from critical services, cause injury or even loss of life.
CGA's "50 in 5" challenge aims to address damages to the Nation's critical assets head-on by bringing damage prevention advocates together around a targeted set of strategic, data-driven priorities. The "50 in 5" call-to-action encourages the damage prevention industry to concentrate on three focus areas that prioritize critical issues identified by CGA's Next Practices Initiative and the top damage root causes that contribute to more than 76 percent of damages to buried infrastructure (according to CGA's most recent DIRT Report):
"The Common Ground Alliance's damage prevention stakeholders have worked diligently to make communities safer by reducing dig-ins — but we are now at an inflection point as an industry," said Sarah K. Magruder Lyle, president and CEO of CGA.
"I encourage every stakeholder to meet our ‘50 in 5' challenge and commit their organizations to making bold choices and investments as we look to cut annual damages in half by 2028. With the massive funding authorized by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the pace of current construction activity, now is the time for the industry to seriously examine how we can make the next dramatic reduction in annual damages and protect critical infrastructure."
"The CGA board of directors felt strongly that the industry must commit to taking concrete steps to significantly reduce damages to underground utilities," said Josh Hinrichs, chair of CGA's board and president of UtiliSource. "We must focus on taking damage prevention to the next level in order to keep our communities safe and connected to the utilities we depend on every day."
With National Safe Digging Month set to kick off in April, CGA will be releasing a variety of new tools and outreach materials in line with the "50 in 5" call-to-action. The annual DIRT Report will continue to be the industry's primary gauge of annual damages, and data and metrics collected by CGA's Damage Prevention Institute will also help inform key interventions and strategies for damage reductions in the coming years.
For more information, visit www.commongroundalliance.com and dirt.commongroundalliance.com.