woody@zocalo.NET (Bill Woodcock) writes:

Okay, so basically the deal was that there were a zillion (like 200) different "call before you dig" hotlines for different areas, and you had to track down the correct one, and there weren't a lot of penalties for not having one for an area, et cetera. Then in 1997, there was a federal house bill to unify it all, it carried over to 1998, and then actually passed around May or June sometime, as part of the Omnibus Federal Transportation act. The upshot of that is that there's one 888 number for the whole country now, and states lose a portion of their federal highway funds if they don't get the utilities which their PUCs regulate to participate in the program.

Its still a bit early to tell if the One-Call legislation made any difference. Only two quarters of information has been reported, and one quarter was down, and the following quarter was up. However, there are still a lot of cases where the excavator did call, but the utility either didn't mark, marked the wrong place, or didn't mark all the lines. As Bill points out, the Department of Transportation is the federal agency in charge of One-Call. States can get a $1M-$5M federal grant for setting up a One-Call coordinator for their state. But there is no national GIS database, nor any truely common way of describing where everything is. After getting a call, the One-Call people will forward the information to the listed contact for all registered utilities in a particular geographic grid. It is then up to each of those contacts to go out and mark their clients' lines. Sometimes a group of utilties will hire a common contractor to mark all of their lines, other utilties send their own people. Sometimes a utiity will forget they had lines in a particular area, and fail to register that grid with the One-Call people. Some companies consider their maps proprietary, and won't allow anyone else to see or use them. Other company maps are just plain wrong. With deregulation, there is no longer just "the phone company" or just "the water company." Multiple companies may have the same type of lines in an area. The marking contractor for one company won't necessarily mark the lines for a different company (or even a different subsidary of the same company), or even alert the excavator he know's there is another company's lines he didn't mark. Its kinda of like another ISP trying to get the SPRINT NOC to open a trouble ticket. There is a bit of tit-for-tat going on. Even after you have all the colors marked on the ground, you are never really sure just what's missing until you start digging. National Call Before You Dig = 888-258-0808 -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation