Call Before You Dig: What CGA's DIRT Data Says About the Real Cost of Hitting a Utility Line

Every excavation contractor has had the moment: the bucket teeth catch something that isn't rock, isn't root, and doesn't give. Maybe it's a gas line. Maybe it's fiber. Maybe it's a water main that turns your trench into a swimming pool in about four seconds. However it plays out, the next forty-eight hours of your life just got a lot more expensive, and the next few years of your insurance premiums probably did too.

The Common Ground Alliance, the industry group that runs the national 811 call-before-you-dig program, tracks every reported hit on underground infrastructure through its Damage Information Reporting Tool, known in the trade simply as DIRT. The numbers in the most recent DIRT Report aren't trending the direction anyone wants, and the reason behind the trend is one every contractor bidding site work right now needs to understand.

The DIRT Data: Damage Is Climbing, Not Falling

CGA's DIRT Report found that damages to underground facilities rose meaningfully in back-to-back years, with damages per dollar of construction spending up roughly 12% and damages per 1,000 locate tickets up over 9% year over year. That's not a rounding error. It's a real, measured increase in how often a crew somewhere in the country hits a line it shouldn't have, at a moment when the industry is excavating more ground than it has in a generation.

The driver isn't mysterious. Federal infrastructure spending under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has pushed a wave of new broadband, water, sewer, and power work into the ground almost everywhere at once. More trenches means more opportunities to hit something, and the data shows the industry's damage-prevention systems haven't scaled up as fast as the digging has. For a subcontractor bidding this kind of work, that's a real exposure, not an abstraction.

What's Actually Causing These Hits

CGA's analysis keeps landing on the same handful of root causes year after year, and they account for the large majority of reported damage. Two in particular show up again and again on the report's own breakdown:

• No notification made to 811 before digging began -- the single most common root cause nationally, and the easiest one to prevent entirely.

• Locating practices not sufficient -- the ticket was called in correctly, but the mark-out itself was incomplete, faded, or misread on site.

• Excavation practices not sufficient -- crews digging too close to a verified mark without hand-exposing or potholing first.

• One-call notification practices not sufficient -- wrong address, wrong work area, or a ticket that expired before digging actually started.

Put together, failures tied to notification and locating account for roughly three out of every four reported damages in CGA's data. That's the uncomfortable part for anyone who assumes damage prevention is mostly bad luck. It isn't. It's overwhelmingly a process failure, which also means it's overwhelmingly preventable with a crew that actually runs the process the same way every single time.

The Real Cost of a Utility Strike

None of this shows up as a single line item on a closeout report. It shows up as a change order dispute over who pays for the emergency repair, a stop-work order that eats three days of schedule float the GC never budgeted for, and a workers' compensation claim if anyone on the crew was close enough to get hurt when the line let go. For a small or mid-size excavation outfit running on tight margins, one serious strike in a bad year can be the difference between a profitable season and a loss.

The repair bill for the damaged line is rarely the expensive part. A contractor who hits a gas line is looking at an emergency evacuation, a fire department response, a utility crew mobilization, and very possibly a shutdown of the entire block until the line is confirmed safe. A fiber hit on a commercial corridor can mean six-figure business-interruption claims from every tenant whose internet and point-of-sale system just went dark. A water main hit next to an occupied building can mean flooding damage that dwarfs the entire excavation contract.

Then there's the part that follows you home: OSHA citations if the strike also created a confined-space or engulfment hazard, state one-call enforcement penalties that in many states now carry real fines for a missed notification, and the liability exposure that follows once the utility's lawyers start calculating their own damages. Insurers who write excavation risk price all of this in, and a contractor with a documented history of utility strikes is going to see it show up in premium renewals long after the hole has been backfilled.

The trades carrying this risk aren't limited to classic pipeline contractors either. Water and sewer utility crews, broadband and fiber installers stringing conduit through established neighborhoods, electrical contractors trenching for underground service and transformer pads, and general excavation outfits doing site development all show up in CGA's damage data every year. If your crew runs a trencher, a mini excavator, or a backhoe loader anywhere near an existing utility corridor, this isn't someone else's risk to manage -- it's yours, on every single ticket.

The 811 Process, Done Right

Calling 811 or submitting a ticket online starts a mandatory waiting period, typically a few business days depending on the state, during which affected utility owners are required to mark the approximate location of their underground facilities with flags or paint. That part is free, and most state one-call laws require it before any mechanized digging begins, not just for new construction but for fence posts, mailbox replacements, and landscaping work too.

The mark-out is the start of due diligence, not the end of it. Marks can be off by the tolerance zone allowed under state law, lines can run deeper or shallower than expected, and abandoned facilities sometimes aren't mapped at all. That's why CGA and OSHA both point crews toward hand-digging or vacuum excavation to confirm the exact location and depth of a marked line before bringing a bucket anywhere near it -- a step commonly called potholing, and one that takes an hour and saves a career.

State one-call laws also set a legal tolerance zone, commonly about 18 to 24 inches on either side of the marked centerline, inside which a crew is expected to switch from mechanized digging to hand tools or vacuum excavation. Outside that zone, a bucket can generally proceed with ordinary care; inside it, the burden shifts squarely onto the excavator to prove the line's exact position before continuing. Crews that don't know their own state's tolerance zone number are, in practice, guessing where the safe digging line actually is -- which is itself one more avoidable root cause hiding inside CGA's "excavation practices not sufficient" category.

Why This Matters More Right Now

Every excavation contractor riding the current wave of federally funded utility, broadband, and water infrastructure work is digging in more unfamiliar ground than usual, often in older neighborhoods with decades of undocumented utility relocations layered underneath. That's exactly the environment where CGA's data shows damage rates climb, and it's exactly the environment where a crew's discipline around notification, locating, and potholing matters most. For a deeper look at how this same discipline plays out once a trench is actually open, our guide to OSHA trenching and excavation safety covers the cave-in side of the same jobsite risk.

Telematics is quietly becoming part of the damage-prevention conversation too. Several major equipment brands now offer GPS-logged machine activity that can be cross-referenced against a locate ticket's mapped work area, giving a contractor a defensible paper trail showing exactly where and when a machine was digging relative to where it was cleared to dig. It won't replace potholing, but paired with a financed, properly maintained fleet running current telematics hardware, it's one more layer of documentation that matters the day a utility claims your crew dug outside its ticket.

Building a Fleet That Can Dig This Work Safely

None of this is an argument against bidding utility and site-development work -- it's some of the steadiest, best-paying work available to a heavy excavator operation right now, especially with infrastructure dollars still working through the pipeline. It is an argument for running the kind of crew and the kind of equipment that lets you dig carefully without killing your production numbers: a properly sized excavator with good bucket control for creeping up on a mark, a dedicated vacuum excavation unit or hand tools staged for potholing, and operators trained to stop and verify rather than push through.

That's also where equipment financing earns its keep. A contractor trying to stretch one undersized, overworked machine across every job on the board is the contractor most likely to skip the careful, slower pass near a utility mark because the schedule won't allow it. Financing the second machine, or the right-sized one, isn't just a production decision -- it's a damage-prevention decision, and BFC works with excavation and utility contractors nationwide, any credit profile, to get the right iron in the fleet before the next trench gets opened.

Ready to put the right equipment behind your damage-prevention program? Visit our home page to learn more about BFC, apply for equipment financing to get your next excavator or vacuum excavation unit working, browse our equipment for sale marketplace for ready-to-work machines, or subscribe to our blog for more guides built for contractors who dig for a living.