Page 11 - Louisiana 811 Magazine 2020 Issue 3

ncreasing Safety
reaches thousands of excavators per year
stop. The software logs the location of the stop by GPS coordinates and allows the user to add photos of the jobsite, along with their notes.
“The app has seven questions and geocodes the exact GPS coordinates of where you are. The address, date and time you stopped are pre-populated.” David said. “When we engage with
an excavator, we let them know we have facilities in the area, and ask if everything is going OK, and ask if they’ve been able to locate our facilities. It starts a dialogue.”
David said that 99 percent of the time, they know before walking up to the foreman if there’s a ticket or not. Atmos Energy employees check for an 811 ticket before getting out of their vehicle. If no 811 ticket has been submitted, they have educational literature they can leave with the excavator explaining the importance of submitting a ticket with Louisiana 811 either by phone or online and information on how to submit a ticket.
Their role isn’t to be the excavation police, but rather to make sure that every excavator is aware of what lurks below their shovels and encourage free participation in the 811 system.
Most of the time, Atmos Energy employees are finding that excavators have an active ticket with Louisiana
811, are in compliance with the law and are being mindful of the company’s lines. But when there’s not a ticket, there’s more work to do. They’ll ask
the excavator if they have a valid ticket number that the Atmos employee couldn’t find. If the answer is no, then they leave a safer digging pamphlet. Either way, they document the worksite with photos, and log it into the iAuditor app.
“We’ve been performing continuing surveillance for years as required by federal law,” David said. “We are required to perform continuous
surveillance of our facilities to identify threats - and this helps us document what were are doing to show the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources Office of Pipeline Safety and PHMSA (Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) what we are doing to protect our underground facilities.”
After a year of the program, employees have made more than 2,500 stops at excavation sites, and left literature at 1,500 of the sites. That indicates an excavation site where there was no ticket, or employees witnessed digging in the tolerance zone with mechanized
“It’s not our goal to police the excavators...”
equipment on top of the company’s underground facilities — a big and very risky practice.
“The tolerance zone for our lines is 18 inches on either side of the pipe. You should to be using hand tools or hydro excavation when digging around pipes,” he said.
But not every stop is adversarial in nature.
“There were more than 1,000 stops where we didn’t drop off literature, because those people were doing everything 100 percent by the law, and digging safely,” he said. “We shake their hands and tell them they’re doing a good job and thank the professional or the homeowner for doing everything by the law.”
Some excavators aren’t wild about the courtesy stops, but most have been
friendly and agreed to move toward compliance.
“It’s not our goal to police the excavators but starting the communication so
we can share with them that damage prevention is a shared responsibility,” David said.
However, out of the 2,500 stops, about 20 required a call to the state’s Office of Pipeline Safety to stop the excavation activities. Those resources are only called in for the most serious issues where an excavator refuses to comply.
“We’ve had a few that said, ‘Don’t confuse me with the facts, I’m not stopping, I’m not calling, etc.’ and we had to get an agent from the Office
of Pipeline Safety involved. The OPS inspectors have been very responsive,” he said.
The Louisiana excavation community is pretty tight, he said, and the goal is to change behavior — especially those excavators who don’t regularly call 811 — that the next Atmos Energy vehicle that drives by might stop and ask you for your 811 ticket number.
“What we’re talking about is behavior modification. If you want excavators
to call 811, this program helps. If they get caught once we hope the next time they just call 811. Ninety-nine percent of the time when you call 811, there is no damage,” he said.
Atmos Energy operates in seven other states, and the Ambassador Program has been rolled out in each of them. The company’s footprint in Louisiana
is second only to Texas, where the company is headquartered and operates their largest pipeline network.
Altogether, the company has made more than 20,000 courtesy stops so far, and plans to continue the program well into the future.
2020, Issue 3 Louisiana 811 • 9