Mandatory Damage Reporting

Ontario One Call
Mandatory Damage Reporting

Background

In June 2020, the membership of Ontario One Call approved changes to its by-laws. One of the important changes was to allow for the legal requirement that members provide damage reporting information to Ontario One Call. Mandatory damage reporting is vital to understanding the root causes of damages and to inform strategies to help members, excavators and one call centres reduce risks.

Schedule 2 of By-Law 2, Part I, S. 16 now reads: “A Member of the Corporation shall provide, at the time or times specified by the Corporation, any such information as is deemed necessary for the Corporation to fulfil its objects. This includes information which advances the Corporation’s public awareness mandate, including damage reporting data.”

Upon approval of a new regulation by the Ontario Government, this by-law will be legally binding on all members.

Approach

Ontario One Call will require that the “Top 20” Members will supply damage information to the DIRT program, which is maintained by the ORCGA. Members are expected to submit data for the year 2021.

The “Top 20” is determined by the number of notifications that a Member received in the period between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2020. The following Members comprise the Top 20 List:

• Enbridge Gas
• Bell Canada
• Rogers Communication
• Hydro One
• City of Toronto
• Cogeco Cable
• City of Ottawa
• Toronto Hydro
• Peel Region
• Alectra Utilities
• Durham Region
• City of Hamilton
• Hydro Ottawa
• City of Windsor
• Region of Halton
• City of Brampton
• Enbridge Pipelines
• City of Oakville
• Region of York
• City of Mississauga

This approach was chosen because the Top 20 members represent more than 70% of all notifications received. Focusing on this group of members allows us to collect a robust data set without putting an administrative burden on all 800+ members of Ontario One Call, many of whom receive less than 500 notifications per year.

Members not included in that list are still welcomed and encouraged to participate.

For New Participants

For new participants in the DIRT program, we understand that some of this data will be submitted later in this year once their data submission processes are established. The deadline for the submission is typically the second Friday of the following January, e.g., 2020 data was to be submitted by January 8, 2021. We strongly recommend that data be submitted on a monthly or quarterly basis through the DIRT website.

You can learn about the process by going to the DIRT website at https://www.cga-dirt.com/orcga. This website has not only the registration page but also links to a 101 introductory page, FAQ, Training course as well as the link to the Tools and Resources and a collection of the USA annual DIRT reports. Ontario’s annual DIRT reports can be found at the ORCGA website https://orcga.com/publications/dirt-report. Please note that the DIRT database does provide a number of built in reports that you can use to analyze your own companies damages to determine what educational programs will help to protect your own infrastructure and reduce damages and interruptions to your service.

You can find assistance by contacting Jennifer Parent at the ORCGA with jennifer@orcga.com or your Member Services contact at Ontario One Call. For those Members who are currently submitting into DIRT we thank you for your continued support of this program which is an essential tool in our continuing efforts to measure and therefore reduce damages, and increase the safety of the excavation community. To those that are new to program, we welcome you and look forward to assisting you.