Common Ground Alliance's 2024 DIRT Report, the most comprehensive annual accounting of damage to buried power, water, fiber, and gas lines in North America, analyzed 196,977 unique damage reports and found the industry moving in the wrong direction. The CGA Index, which tracks year-over-year damage trends, rose from 94.0 in 2023 to 96.7 in 2024. For underground utility, pipeline, and excavation contractors, that number is not an abstraction. It is a direct measure of how often a dig goes wrong, and how much of that risk could be designed out of a job with the right equipment and the right process.

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One Root Cause Dominates Everything Else

The 2024 DIRT Report found that the top 10 root causes accounted for 85 percent of all reported damages, and utility work, particularly water/sewer and telecommunications/CATV projects, dominated nine of those ten. Failure to notify 811 before digging was the single leading cause, responsible for 24.54 percent of all damages nationwide. Excavators failing to maintain clearance after verifying marks was second at 16.07 percent, and facility-marking errors by locators accounted for another 20 percent combined across two categories.

• 196,977 unique damage reports analyzed nationwide in 2024 (CGA DIRT Report)

• CGA Index rose from 94.0 (2023) to 96.7 (2024), signaling damages are getting worse, not better

• Failure to notify 811 before excavating: 24.54% of all damages, the single leading cause

• Excavator failed to maintain clearance after verifying marks: 16.07%

• Facility not marked or marked inaccurately due to locator error: 20.52% combined

• Excavators faced an average 38% chance of being unable to start work on time due to incomplete locate responses

Why Potholing and Clearance Failures Matter to Your Bid

Two of the top ten root causes, failure to pothole before digging and failure to maintain clearance after marks are verified, are squarely equipment and process issues rather than locator failures. An excavator operator trusting a mark and digging blind, instead of exposing the line first with a non-destructive method, is a decision made on site, with the equipment already mobilized. That is exactly the gap hydro excavation, vacuum excavation using pressurized water and a vacuum system to expose buried utilities without a blade or bucket touching them, is built to close.

What Hydro Excavation Actually Changes on a Job

A traditional pothole dug with a mini excavator or backhoe still carries strike risk right up until the line is visually confirmed. A hydro excavation truck exposes the utility with pressurized water while vacuuming the resulting slurry into an onboard debris tank, which means the exposure itself carries essentially none of the mechanical strike risk a bucket or blade does. For contractors bidding water/sewer, telecom, gas distribution, and general utility relocation work, the categories the DIRT Report identifies as the highest-risk sectors, that difference is the core of a defensible damage-prevention program, not a nice-to-have.

The Locate-Timing Problem You Cannot Fix, and the One You Can

The DIRT Report's finding that excavators faced an average 38 percent chance of an incomplete or late locate response is a real scheduling problem, and it is largely outside a contractor's control; it depends on 811 center staffing and facility-operator response times in a given state. What a contractor does control is what happens once marks are down: whether the crew potholes and verifies before committing to mechanical excavation, and whether the equipment on site makes that verification step fast enough that it does not become the item that gets skipped under schedule pressure.

Financing the Equipment That Makes Compliance the Easy Choice

Hydro excavation trucks, trailer-mounted vacuum excavation units, and the support equipment around them represent a real capital outlay, and the contractors who skip potholing most often are not reckless, they are working without the equipment that makes doing it right the fast option instead of the slow one. Structured equipment financing lets a utility or pipeline contractor add a hydro excavation unit to the fleet without competing against an existing excavator or trenching loan for the same cash, which is usually the practical reason non-destructive verification gets skipped on tight-margin jobs in the first place.

Where This Fits Against Your Existing Fleet

Most underground utility and pipeline contractors are not replacing excavators, trenchers, or skid steers with hydro excavation; they are adding it as a verification step ahead of mechanical digging, which keeps the rest of the fleet, excavators, backhoes, and compact track loaders, working on schedule because a strike-related shutdown never happens in the first place. For a damage prevention program an insurer or a utility-company client will actually credit, that combination, mechanical equipment plus a dedicated non-destructive verification unit, is becoming close to a baseline expectation on water/sewer, gas, and telecom work.

Enforcement Is Catching Up With the Data

CGA's own board has called for stronger penalties for 811 noncompliance, GPS-enabled mapping, and transparent on-time locate performance metrics as part of breaking what it calls a damage plateau. States with active enforcement programs for facility operators already show meaningfully higher on-time locate rates than states without them, which means the regulatory and liability environment around a damage incident is only getting less forgiving, not more, as more states adopt stronger 811 enforcement in response to the report's findings.

What To Review This Quarter

Pull your own crew's incident and near-miss log for the last two years and see how many trace back to a skipped pothole or a dig past a verified mark; if the answer is more than zero, that is a specific, fixable gap. Check whether your current equipment mix makes non-destructive verification the fast option on a typical job, or the one that gets dropped under schedule pressure. For

A Note on Where This Risk Concentrates

The DIRT Report's sector breakdown is not evenly distributed. Water and sewer work and telecommunications or CATV installation together drove nine of the ten leading root causes, which tracks with the nature of that work: frequent, shallow, often-urgent excavation in corridors already crowded with other buried infrastructure. Contractors who concentrate in those two sectors specifically are operating in the highest-risk segment the report identifies, which is exactly where a non-destructive verification step earns back its cost fastest in avoided strikes, avoided claims, and avoided schedule losses.

Insurance and Client Expectations Are Starting to Reflect the Data

As the 2024 DIRT Report's findings circulate through the utility and pipeline sector, more general contractors and utility-company clients are asking subcontractors directly what their damage-prevention process looks like before awarding work, not after an incident. A contractor who can point to potholing and hydro excavation equipment as a standard part of their process, rather than an occasional precaution, is answering that question from a stronger position, and in many cases is seeing it reflected in lower premiums at renewal.

What CGA's Recommended Fixes Actually Call For

The 2024 DIRT Report's own recommendations center on three things: stronger enforcement of 811 notification and locate-timeliness requirements, including penalties for noncompliance and best-value locator contracting; targeted training and mapping investment in the highest-risk sectors, water/sewer and telecom specifically; and scaling practices that already work in the states and regions where on-time locate rates are measurably better. None of those three fixes are things an individual contractor controls directly, but all three point toward the same operational response: build a process, and a fleet, that does not depend on the locate system working perfectly every time.

Documenting the Process Pays for Itself

When a strike does happen, and across 196,977 reported incidents in a single year, it happens often, the contractor's own documentation of its damage-prevention process is what separates a defensible incident from a liability exposure that follows the company for years. A dated log showing 811 notification, locate marks received, and a potholing or hydro excavation verification step completed before mechanical digging began is the single strongest piece of evidence a contractor can produce after an incident, and it costs nothing beyond the discipline of keeping it current on every job.

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