There is mounting pressure on the damage prevention industry as locate requests volumes continue to rise year after year. Excavators are increasingly frustrated at project delays caused by long waits for locates to be completed. Experienced locators are becoming scarce and are experiencing burnout because of impossible workloads. Facility owners fight to balance their financial commitment to safety and their commitment to keep prices down for their customers as they face higher and higher costs to provide locates. At the end of the day, something must give.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) has released its final investigation report on the 2021 Minell Pipeline incident. A farmer ruptured a natural gas pipeline in McAuley, Manitoba, while using a tractor to maintain a water drainage channel in his field. The pipeline did not have adequate soil coverage, creating a serious safety hazard. Thankfully, no one was injured, but ensuring an incident like this doesn’t happen again is a priority.

Is it March already? 

On one hand, we’re most of the way through the Spring Gauntlet of Document Review & Revision > Hiring > Training, however on the other hand I am merely half done training our two training groups. There is an end in sight, but despite how tantalizingly close it may feel, we’re not quite finished here yet.

 When Utility Safety Partners began this monthly Newsletter, we knew creating content each month would be challenging. While there’s always a story to tell, cobbling articles together each month wasn’t exactly in everyone’s job description. Despite that, we knew the outreach would benefit our objective to promote awareness and reduce damages to buried utilities and reduce contacts with overhead power lines.

When you think about it, wellness generally, and mental health, are clearly safety issues, particularly in a world now learning to live through a global pandemic.

 Fleur Yumol is trained as a clinical registered social worker meaning she has a master’s level in social work that allows her to provide counseling to individuals, families, and couples. She’s part of the team at Unify which provides Employee Assistance to employees of Utility Safety Partners. Fleur recently joined Mike Sullivan on an episode of The Safety Moment podcast.

I’ve been engaged in legislative development for a long time at the federal and provincial level. And given my long-standing relationship with the Canadian Common Ground Alliance, I’ve been asked many times to provide my opinion on the relationship between legislation and best practice. In short, the two are closely related, yet distinct in their purpose and scope. Legislation refers to the laws and regulations passed by governments and other governing bodies, while best practice refers to the optimal approach or methodology for achieving a particular outcome or goal. 

Cliff was just a young man in 1986 working at that construction site. 20 years old. He was operating a jackhammer and within moments “the lights went out” for him. He made contact with three live electrical cables and suffered a cardiac arrest due to the severe electrical shock. In addition, Cliff sustained series electrical burns and exit wounds to over 15 per cent of his body with major damage to both knees. Nearly a third of each knee compartment was disintegrated

Utility Safety Partners boasts one of the strongest public awareness and engagement programs among all the Notification Centres in Canada and we get a lot of help from our members – many of whom are transmission pipeline companies that are legally required to maintain ongoing public awareness programs. While our program doesn’t replace those programs, it needs to be complementary – and that means it also has to be internally complementary meaning, everything we do needs to be supported.