Emergency or Priority? Fixing the Problem of Weekend Planned Emergencies

By Sher Kirk, Operations Director, USP

When the business rules and practices around emergency and priority locates were first developed, the distinction between the two was clear enough — or so it was thought. 

The definition of an Emergency Locate Request is:

• The excavator must be digging to correct a condition that poses an immediate threat to life, health or property and that they must be on site with equipment or enroute to the site with equipment to arrive within two hours of the call to the notification centre. 

The definition of a Priority Locate Request is:

• The excavator must be digging to correct a condition that poses some threat to life, or property and the excavator and equipment will be ready to start work in the window between two hours from the call time and a time before the usual three business days’ notice.

Real world examples of emergency work are repairing a hit and blowing gas line, repairing a broken water main, replacing a broken power line, house fires, etc. Examples of priorities include repair to a slow leaking water main, repair of a sinkhole where the area is safely cordoned off, repair to water service where the affected property has been provided a temporary water supply, etc.

The most important distinction between a priority and an emergency is the amount of notice we can give the locators to respond, and that is where the lines began to blur. Over time, more and more asset owners and contract locators stopped responding to priorities before work was to begin. At that point, the excavator, now on site to dig for the repair, had to call the notification centre and place an emergency request to replace the priority request. Because of this practice, excavators eventually stopped using priority and just called in emergencies when they arrived on site.

The impact this had on the system was a hidden, but costly one. Municipalities, which often plan priority work to take place on the weekend, started overloading the system on Saturday and Sunday mornings by calling in multiple emergency locate requests at once. The result of this practice was that the notification centre had to schedule staff to work on Saturday and Sunday to handle the volume of “planned water emergencies,” which stretched the staff we had available for busy weekdays as we had to give more agents days off between Monday and Friday. In addition, locators had to scramble to multiple locations at once to perform costly overtime emergency locates on behalf of asset owners.

Eventually, and as part of multi-stakeholder discussions around standardizing business rules notification centres, all parties came to the same conclusion — the solution that eases the pressure on the system is to honour the original intent of emergency and priority locates. The best way to manage "planned emergencies" is for the requests to be placed when the date and time of the excavation is known to the ones planning the work, AND for the asset owners to agree to respond to priorities by making best efforts to respond on or before the time requested on the ticket. This practice gives locators the opportunity to plan their workforce to match the municipalities’ weekend workload and to arrange meet times in a way that keeps the work manageable. If both asset owners and excavators accept their shared responsibility, the weekend planned emergency issue will be much improved, freeing up agents and locators to respond to unplanned emergencies. If you work for a municipality, please talk to your utilities group about submitting priority locates prior to their weekend work.