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Ohio Summit: All About A Safer Tomorrow
Working together to make Ohio a safer place to live and work was a theme heard throughout the inaugural Ohio Damage Prevention Summit in September. Stakeholders from across Ohio and other states attended parts of the three-day Summit in Columbus.
The Summit opened with the all-day Utility Locator Training Workshop instructed by Bob Nighswonger of Utility Training Academy. The workshop included classroom instruction followed by hands-on outdoor training. Nighswonger commented that the Summit is important in allowing people from all parts of the industry an opportunity to get together and learn from each other.
Stakeholders were given the opportunity to meet each other and discuss what is happening in the industry during the Ohio Utilities Protection Service (O.U.P.S.) reception with the exhibitors on the first night of the Summit.
Welcome to the Summit
Thomas Charles, Director of the Ohio Department of Public Safety (ODPS), welcomed attendees with an opening session discussing the importance of state agencies, private sector companies and organizations working together and forming partnerships. Charles was appointed to his current position in January, but before that worked as the Ohio Inspector General and the Executive Director of the Office of Legislative Inspector General. He talked about his experiences in those roles.
Charles explained that like damage prevention professionals, ODPS is committed to saving lives and reducing injuries and economic loss. They work to meet their mission through education, service and protection. “We are committed to assisting partners around the state in making communities safer places to live and work,” Charles said.
While ODPS has eight departments and more than 4,000 employees, each division works together to accomplish the department’s safety mission. The ODPS also relies on local community partners as resources to help make decisions about where to deploy assets.
“We must continue to partner to do the best job we can to serve and protect the public,” Charles said.
Charles’s opening remarks were followed by two full days of sessions to educate and inform attendees and to make them stop and think about how best to protect vital underground infrastructures.
Embracing Change
As Ohio prepares to make changes to its one call law, members of the Ohio Damage Prevention Coalition conducted a panel discussion about the process to make changes to the code for the first time since 1990. The Coalition was established in February to get everyone to the table so they could work out changes before bringing any proposed changes to the legislature.
Coalition member Scott Tustin, with Columbia Gas, said the Coalition encourages participation from diverse groups so that everybody can have input and create legislation that will be successful and not have opposition when it gets to Capitol Hill.
The Coalition determined that it would start with what member Mark Potnick of the Ohio Contractors Association called “low-hanging fruit” or issues not as contentious, but rather one or two issues that would improve the law and could easily gain consensus. “This will make it safer for all of us and give the Coalition the impetus to go on and work on the more difficult issues,” Potnick said.
Christina Polesovsky of the Ohio Petroleum Association, and co-chair of the Coalition, agreed. “We need to get all parties talking and move the bill forward. We want to know what their concerns were the last go-around, know why the legislation failed and make sure everyone’s opinions are heard,” she said. “We are taking small bites at a time and moving forward. The Coalition is something that will be around for a long time because it allows for interaction between parties.”
Among those issues that sub-committees are addressing are topics such as enforcement, marking standards and positive response.
The Coalition is also looking at what other states and groups have done. Mississippi 811 was one state that had success in bringing changes to their state one-call law. Mississippi 811 Executive Director Sam Johnson and others involved in their process presented a panel discussion at Ohio’s Summit on the Path to Successful Legislation.
A Point of View
Another Coalition member, Joe Igel, of George J. Igel & Co., Inc., offered a session on the contractor’s perspective on damage prevention. Igel said there are two main focuses a contractor has when it comes to damage prevention.
“The first is safety. You run the risk of injury to an employee, the public or property if you damage a utility line,” he said. “The secondary issue is that it opens up the company to lawsuits and a negative public image. Our risk management team wants to keep our name out of the papers. You also lose time and money. A hit can easily cost you a half to a full day of work.”
Igel said that despite the best safeguards, damages will occur. “There will be dig-ins, but we need to work with stakeholders and build consensus, bridges of cooperation,” he said.
He works to make any incident a learning experience with his staff and works with members of O.U.P.S. to have a liaison at safety trainings to talk about unique issues and how to handle them. “Things are never the way they tell you in the book,” he said. “We want our employees to have the knowledge to know when things are not right and to make the call when they see evidence of a utility, such as a pedestal stand, but an absence of marks.”
As a member of Ohio’s Central Damage Prevention Council, Igel said he has established connections with utilities that make it easy to work with them to correct any missing marks or other issues from a locate ticket.
In addition to education for his staff, Igel talked about the carrot and the stick. “If you do one, you need to do the other equally,” he said. “For me measures to reward are about changing attitudes. We have a recognition program that singles out employees who go above and beyond. We believe in catching people doing something right.”
We are a Team
In a session that demonstrated the true meaning of working together, Ohio Department of Homeland Security led a discussion on an asset protection tool called Automated Critical Asset Management System (ACAMS) involving partnership between the public and private sectors. ACAMS is a no-cost tool offered by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Infrastructure Systems to men and women who are the first line of defense. It is a Web-based portal designed to help collect and organize critical infrastructure asset data as part of a comprehensive infrastructure protection program.
It allows emergency responders to prepare for disasters long before there is a threat. Collecting accurate infrastructure information requires partnership between the government and the private sector. Having all this information in one place allows all participants to look at the same information together to work as a unified team.
Getting the Message Out
Bringing underground protection to a national perspective, Khrysanne Kerr of Common Ground Alliance (CGA) offered an update on key CGA initiatives like the 811 public awareness campaign, the Damage Information Reporting Tool and the Best Practices. Kerr discussed the structure and organization of the member-driven organization. “We have more than 1,400 volunteers working on various committees,” Kerr said. Committees focus on one-call systems, technology, regional partners, data reporting and evaluation, education programs, marking and Best Practices.
She discussed the process for how to submit a Best Practice and how they are developed through the committee. The CGA published its eighth version of the publication in March 2011 with seven new practices. There are currently 21 proposals under review for the Best Practices Committee.
Kerr also talked about the Damage Information Reporting Tool (DIRT) which is an online data-collection tool. The 2010 results were released on October 12, 2011, and focus on what the data show in their entirety and identify conclusions and recommendations for damage prevention. Preliminary results, according to Kerr, indicate that less than one percent of excavations preceded by a one-call notification experiences damages. “Damages reported to the CGA’s DIRT database for 2010 further demonstrate that approximately one-third were the result of a failure to make notification prior to excavation.”
A highlight of CGA awareness efforts was the observance of August 11 as 811 Day across the country. Kerr shared some innovative ways that one-call centers and other stakeholders commemorated the day, including NASCAR sponsorships and stakeholders lining the ropes at NBC’s Today Show and Fox News Channel’s Fox and Friends. “We had significant stakeholder engagement for the day,” Kerr said. There were 1,700 stakeholder tools downloaded from the CGA Communication plan. Some other creative awareness ideas included paid advertising, partnering with minor and major league baseball teams, media blitzes, press conferences and use of food. There were 811 birthday cakes delivered to local radio stations that generated talk on the radio about the day and a pizza chain that offered pizzas on that day for $8.11 with Dig Safely information on every box. Kerr also highlighted other grassroots efforts, digital and social media campaigns and employee events. One included an 811 ice sculpture.
Kerr encouraged all the stakeholders to work together to get involved and help promote the Dig Safely message.
And Many More
The sessions also included presentations by Robert Glenn, Executive Director of Ohio Homeland Security, and Nancy Dragani, Executive Director of Ohio Emergency Management Agency, on Working Together Before, During and After a Disaster; Lance O’Donnell and Steve McGaffin of Paradigm on Collecting Address Data in the Field; Sam Hall of PHMSA on the Criteria for Federal Intervention; Rick Simmers of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources on the Marcellus and Utica Shale Exploration and Drilling; and many other experts in the damage prevention industry.
Safer Tomorrows
The closing session of the Summit, given by Roger Cox of ACTS, was entitled The Big Picture: From Concept to Cleanup. This presentation tied all the previous days’ events and sessions together, summarizing that it’s about all stakeholders sharing a common goal: to ensure everyone goes to sleep at night knowing they are safe. They can rest assured that the professionals responsible for the underground facilities around them have done everything they can to protect them from harm.
The Summit proved to be a great opportunity for stakeholders to share their perspectives and network with others in the damage prevention industry. To be a part of this unique event in 2012, join us in Columbus on April 2-4. You don’t want to miss this!
As Roger Lipscomb, President of O.U.P.S., put it best, “It’s all about creating safer tomorrows!”
