Deploying Fiber and Other Infrastructure Complicated by Lack of Consistent 811 Rules

Lyle, who lives in the Washington area, noted that Maryland, Virginia and D.C. all have different time requirements. “We are setting excavators and locators up to fail.” If you serve more than one state, “you’re dealing with multiple laws, which is insane,” she said: “It’s a tough environment to work in.”

Some states, like Ohio and Texas, are moving to adopt standards “mirroring” industry best practice, which is to call 811 two days before excavating, Lyle said. One of the only areas where there’s broad agreement in Washington is on the need for Congress to approve the Pipeline Efficiency and Safety Act of 2023, which would establish national standards for 811 programs, she said.

An April gas pipeline explosion in Missouri has called attention to the need for consistent rules, Lyle said. The National Transportation Safety Board said in a preliminary report this month that the explosion occurred after a company putting in a fiber line damaged the pipeline. The board found that Liberty Utilities, which owns the gas line, had sent an 811 locator to mark it two days earlier, but the location of the section involved wasn’t identified or marked in the process.

Underground infrastructure is damaged in the U.S. almost 200,000 times a year, with telecom infrastructure hit the hardest, Lyle said. The leading “root causes” -- which include failure to notify 811, locator error and improper excavation practices -- don’t change from year to year, she said. Notifying 811 is the easiest way to avoid problems, she added.

Erik Phillips, vice president-operations at UtiliQuest, agreed that the U.S. needs consistent rules. “Everyone is working in different states. You’re hopping around,” and “every state is different.” As a locator, UtiliQuest doesn’t want anyone to have to stop work on a project, he said. “People make bad decisions when they’re running behind and they’re desperate.”

Every state and most counties also have exemptions to 811 rules, Phillips said. “There are many more exemptions than people understand.”

If the states had their way, there would be no exemptions, said Louis Panzer, executive director of North Carolina’s NC 811. Farmers, railroads and transportation departments are among those that get exemptions, he said.

The places where providers lay fiber already have lots of infrastructure in the ground, Panzer said. “Space is at a premium,” especially when you’re upgrading markets from copper to fiber. Getting information about what’s located where is difficult in the U.S., he said, especially from telecom providers, which tend to treat the location of their lines as proprietary and are reluctant to share. Some information also isn’t up-to-date, he added.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, approved by Congress in 2021, doesn’t say anything about damage prevention or the mapping of infrastructure, Lyle said. California, however, recently passed a law that “anything new you’re putting into the ground” must be “GIS findable,” she said: “That’s a big step forward.”

The mapping challenge “often seems overwhelming,” Lyle said. “We have a ton” of legacy infrastructure in the ground, including 19th-century pipelines. Locators collect a huge amount of data, which is often not shared with other companies, she said. “We’re working to change that, but it’s a big task,” she said. “The underground world is getting more and more congested.”