The 2024 damage picture
The Common Ground Alliance's Damage Information Reporting Tool, the industry's only comprehensive record of buried utility damages in North America, logged 196,977 unique reported damages in 2024, and its damage index rose from 94 to 96.7. Telecommunications facilities took 49 percent of the hits and natural gas facilities 39 percent. Water and sewer work was the leading type of work when damage occurred, and the top ten root causes accounted for 85 percent of all damages. The damage numbers track construction activity, which is exactly the warning for a busy oilfield: more pads, more pipelines, more strikes.
The root causes are stable
The root causes split across the whole damage prevention process: notification failures at 26 percent, locating practices at 34 percent, and excavation practices at 33 percent. Failure to notify 811 was the single top damage driver for 2024 and every prior year. The report also found that excavators were unable to start on schedule 38 percent of the time because locate requests came back incomplete, a predictability problem that pushes crews to dig without full marks and then pay for it.
The discipline that prevents the strike
The prevention program is not complicated, which is what makes the damage data so frustrating. Call 811 before any ground disturbance, wait out the locate, confirm the marks, pothole or hand-dig within the tolerance zone, and treat the marks as sacred until the job is done. The operator side adds the same controls: as-built drawings for flowlines and power, a ground disturbance permit tied to the work plan, and the locate ticket number written on the permit so the crew and the inspector can verify it. DPI-accredited excavation contractors, who follow formal damage prevention protocols, measurably reduced their damage rates from 2023 to 2024, which is the proof that the discipline works when it is enforced.
Ground disturbance is a scheduled operation, exactly like the rig move or the P&A program: permit, locate, pothole, dig, document. The locate ticket and the permit are field records that belong in the same system as the tickets and dispatch logs. If ground disturbance runs on word of mouth and the locate ticket lives in a truck cab, an operations audit will show where the next strike is scheduled.