Whether you’re a municipal utility manager, a water and wastewater manager, or involved in development, construction, or underground installation of any kind and you’re not already utilizing a robust GIS (Geographic Information System) data platform to house existing conditions documentation, utility maps, and construction progress, it is time to get started.
Because, based on current state and federal government trends, utilizing cloud-based, SaaS reporting and digital record-keeping may be mandated by law soon.
The city of Chicago has mandated all subsurface utility and excavation work must be run through its Office of Underground Coordination (OUC), and documented in the city’s customized dotMaps system. The Common Ground Alliance (CGA) considers the Chicago project a successful case study and leader in their “50 in 5” initiative, focused on reducing all subsurface utility strikes by 50% by 2028.
The CGA’s CEO, Sarah Magruder Lyle said of Chicago’s initiative in a recent interview, “[W]e can provide access to mapping, and we can provide access to this information, and it actually does make the system better. They’ve shown that mapping tools work.”
California Gears Up for Statewide Utility GIS
Across the country in California, Senate Bill 865 requires that all new subsurface installations in the state be “mapped using a geographic information system and maintained as permanent records of the operator.” While SB 865 has been signed into law by the Governor, its implementation has been delayed due, in part, to slow staff hiring for its newly created Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety (Energy Safety) which left the Underground Safety Board with several challenges, detailed in their 2023 Results Report.
The Energy Safety Office for California, a state that is home to several of the nation’s largest cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego among them, and the world’s fifth largest economy, received 1,232 damage notices and complaints in 2023. 83.7% of those notices were for damage caused by striking underground facilities, 11.8% were general complaints and 4.5% were complaints received through the state’s new “No 811” pilot program.
The governing body for the Energy Safety Office, the Underground Safety Board oversees a group of committees, each specializing in a particular segment of subsurface mapping and safety.
Unmarked and Abandoned Lines
Potholing
Planning and Design
Ticket Process
Legislative
Education
Agriculture
Safety Lessons
Geographical Information Systems
Each committee appears to still be fleshing out their missions and staffing, but are making significant progress toward achieving their mission. That means full enforcement of California SB 865 won’t be far behind, and it is already taking shape. Of the notices and complaints mentioned above, 48 were investigated, concluding in 54 probable violation notices and $23,000 in fines for Safe Dig Act violations.
NYC’s Underground Infrastructure Mapping Initiative: UNUM
UNUM (Unification for Underground Resilience Measures) is the most current iteration of New York’s continuing push to geospatially capture its underground infrastructure, administered by New York University, partnering with GISMO.
How UNUM Was Born
The City of New York has undertaken multiple projects designed to provide existing conditions documentation of its subsurface utilities. More than two decades ago, the city converted all city-wide paper maps of water mains to CAD (computer aided design) files. Once the water line map was well underway, the city began to create a “base map” in GIS. This allowed for accurate geolocation of the water system. The sewer system maps quickly followed suit. Currently, the city’s water and sewer records GIS system is publicly available.
Immediately post 9/11, the city created an Emergency Mapping & Data Center, a project that gridded and mapped ground zero and was the nexus of the Deep Infrastructure Group (DIG) team, who digitized the map data, proving the value of created an integrated, common, public-use map of utilities. It also proved how challenging capturing accurate subsurface data can be and became the impetus for UNUM.
UNUM’s purpose was to investigate subsurface data development, integration, and interoperability options. Overcoming the considerable obstacles to mapping such an involved infrastructure as NYC’s requires the ability to integrate subsurface utility and facilities data among various stakeholders, creating a standardized 3D system and model for said data, and pulling it all into a single digitized map. Although 45 individual stakeholders backed the project, and it made significant headway in subsurface visualization for NYC, the project has not continued past 2022.
Is The Future SUE + GIS?
While mandates and large initiatives for GIS record-keeping are currently limited to larger municipalities like New York and Chicago, and California, as mentioned above, individual communities are leaning into GIS utility mapping for their subsurface infrastructure.
Alongside these projects, states are beginning to mandate SUE (Subsurface Utility Engineering) surveys prior to large public infrastructure projects, like highway building. What began in 2021 with Colorado and Pennsylvania has now filtered out to 20 states, each with its own specifications for compliance before large-scale construction.
While this is helpful on a project-by-project basis, it also can cause unnecessary redundancies in work, and requires the need for states to make significant changes to how their 811 One Call programs are administered. As it currently stands, the record-keeping responsibilities fall onto individual organizations – to both store the existing conditions documentation and provide it to other construction participants as needed.
What the Chicago project has proven, and California is gearing up for, is the integration of stringent utility and underground facilities mapping and data capture and GIS technology, providing a repository, centralized information hub, and approval procedure for any contractor before breaking ground.
While SUE may not be required, accuracy in subsurface data capture and mapping is vital to the success of these projects. What may be a bigger obstacle to adoption, however, is industry bias against digitization.
A recent study created by Censuswide found that while 32% of respondents understand the need for new digital technology and 43% could improve their outcomes with continuous access to existing conditions documentation, 28% of project time is still spent on rework, an additional 18% is spent just trying to find documentation and data, and 49% of the 1,000 respondents to the survey say their projects go over budget and schedule.
78% reported that they are either in search of new technologies, consolidating new technology investment, or re-evaluating their digitalization. Only 44% of stakeholders have embraced “digital formats and workflows.” 32% of specialty contractors are either at the starting line, or not even ready to line up, in the digital race.
The Solution: Implement GIS Before it Becomes a Mandate
There are several well-regarded GIS companies and programs making strides in helping municipalities map their infrastructure. There is also, however, one issue they all have in common, and that is the data stored in the GIS system is only as good as the data you put into it.
That’s where GPRS and SiteMap® (patent pending) come in. Our goal is to bridge the gap between poor, outdated, and incomplete as-builts and real-time 99.8%+ accurate subsurface utility infrastructure location and mapping, to provide clients a single source of truth for accurate underground facilities data that is secure, shareable, and accessible from anywhere 24/7.
SiteMap® contains its own cloud-based GIS platform, where GPRS houses geolocated, layered, utility maps, CCTV video pipe inspection reports, leak detection reports, 3D laser scans, photogrammetry and drone photogrammetry deliverables, CAD drawings, and more. SiteMap® also offers complete data portability to other GIS systems like Esri’s ArcGIS system. So, no matter what GIS platform you choose, the accurate existing conditions data GPRS and SiteMap® provide is digitized, stored, and secure for your use.
That’s why at GPRS we say we Intelligently Visualize The Built World® for customers nationwide. To learn more about SiteMap® or book a personal live SiteMap® demonstration, click below.
