Early Communication Key for Avoiding Utility Damage, Experts Say

NASHVILLE, June 5, 2025 – Communicating early with cities and location companies and a top-down focus on safety can help broadband providers avoid hitting buried utility infrastructure, experts told ISPs here at Fiber Connect in Nashville on Wednesday.

Erika Lee, executive vice president of the Common Ground Alliance, said the nonprofit had found 20 percent of incidents in which buried infrastructure was damaged occurred during telecom work. That includes electric, natural gas and water lines, and existing fiber, among other things.

“The reason that the damage occurs is often failure to maintain clearance from the facilities, or it’s failing to verify the location of the facilities,” she said. She said follow-up surveys showed the crews were often under a time crunch.

Lee said the group had done research into organizations with strong safety records, and found that executives prioritizing damage prevention was common in those companies.

“What we find is, it starts at the top,” she said. “That’s something that is eventually built into practices, built into procedures. The people that are doing the work for you, whether it’s your own staff or subcontractors, they’ll know that damage prevention and being safe on the job is a priority,”

Heath Simpson, CEO of Ritter Communications, said communicating with cities early in the process was important so that frequently under-staffed GIS offices could prepare for the volume of work. The company has been getting “dozens and dozens” of builds underway in the last four months and found the approach helpful, he said.

“A lot of these municipalities have not had new builds like this since the eighties with cable, so they don’t have the staffing,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone on-site to visit and I’ve had a gas company say, ‘We’re really sorry, but we can’t find our gas lines,’ or the water department can’t find their sewer lines.”

Lee said the same went for private locating companies, who can also have time crunches that can make it difficult to allocate staff resources if they don’t know about a big project far enough in advance.

She also urged against calling in several different sites on the same day in an effort to ensure one would be work-ready. 

“Those practices overload the system even more and make it challenging for those locators to be efficient,” she said.