The Tech Stopping Wrong Digs
- By Lachlan Colquhoun
- November 14, 2022
Suppose you were doing a building or construction project in Australia in the last century. In that case, it might have been an afterthought for you to check to see if you might be disturbing any underground infrastructure — such as gas or electricity cabling — before you commenced.
To get this information, builders would have contacted a small state-based organization, and the relevant plans would have been mailed out in a few weeks after checking the largely paper-based systems of the relevant asset owners.
Fast forward to 2022, and underneath Australian cities is a growing labyrinth of infrastructure assets, from gas pipelines and electricity and phone cables to more recent fiber optic cabling.
In response, the state-based organizations have banded together to form a national organization called Before You Dig Australia. It has a safety mission to inform builders of the risks of damaging any asset owners before they put a shovel in the ground or get busy with an excavator.
Before You Dig chief executive Mell Greenall says that the organization is now fielding 25,000 inquiries per day.
Around half of these come from the residential sector, including individuals doing their projects, with the balance from the building and construction industry working on commercial projects. 70% of the damage, however, comes from the commercial sector.
“To put that in perspective, one of our larger members in the energy space in New South Wales averages 200 strikes a month on their infrastructure,” says Greenall.
“Remember that is just one member in one state. We have 600 members across the country who own infrastructure, so even if you took that as an average and rolled it out, that is far too high.”
Going digital
Technology solutions have been vital in coping with the surge in demand and aligning with Before You Dig’s safety mission.
The organization went through a major data aggregation, digitalization, and automation project in 2018 and 2019, significantly improving response times.
The project has reduced the time between registering an inquiry on the website and delivering the information to ten minutes. But Greenall has a much larger vision for where this can go.
“It’s about how we aggregate the data and share that modeling to asset owners to improve the quality of plans and maps”
She sees the potential for Before You Dig to play a critical role in aggregating increasingly sophisticated geospatial data from all players in the industry and creating a constantly updated database of all of Australia’s underground assets and construction activity.
“In the U.S. and U.K., they have gone through this process and produce targeted reporting and root cause analysis of incidents,” says Greenall.
“That is one of my ambitions to bring that here because it is really one of the missing pieces of the puzzle at the moment, and we are starting to ramp up our discussions with members on how we collate the data and how we put that into something meaningful back into the industry as a key safety tool.”
State and Territory Governments are currently involved in digital twinning projects. Greenall says Before You Dig has a “seat at the table” in these discussions and how to optimize data sharing from these projects with the industry.
For example, data on underground assets in Australia conforms to an industry-standard “indicative only.” Still, the digital twinning projects — driven by geospatial data — create the potential for the data to be even more accurate and real-time.
“We are looking at how we can partner with government agencies and doing a proof of concept on how we can embed Before You Dig into every part of an infrastructure project before it goes ahead,” says Greenall.
“It’s about how we aggregate the data and share that modeling back to asset owners to improve the quality of plans and maps throughout the country, along with meaningful feedback loops to the industry so we can also capture the data.”
Toward a national portal
The key going forward, she says, is to create “collaborative data spaces” and be able to share data going forward.
The goal now is to create Before You Dig as a national portal and a home for an ever-improving digital twin which is layered with the organization’s safety messaging.
“The data is now key, but it comes back to the safety imperative and how we can drive better safety outcomes,” says Greenall.
She gives the example of earlier this year when strikes in Victoria and across the water in Tasmania took out Tasmania’s internet connectivity for eight hours.
“This is not just about somebody not being able to watch Netflix; it is critical communication for health services and industry,” says Greenall.
“Every time a shovel goes into the ground, it has a chance of hitting high voltage power or high volume gas or fiber optics, and that could damage critical infrastructure and put it at risk.”
Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their entire business models. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/AaronAmat