- Excavation Practices is the leading root cause group for natural gas, while Locating Practices leads for telecommunications.
- Telecommunications stakeholders and their subcontractors damage their own facilities and other service provider facilities within their industry about twice as often (14.22%) as natural gas stakeholders and their subcontractors do (7.18%).
- Excavators (including engineering and road builders) and locators submit a significant number of reports for damages to both natural gas and telecom facilities.
- Telecom facilities are often damaged at shallower depths than natural gas.
- Reports of damages to natural gas facilities have higher quality (DQI) than reports involving telecommunications facilities.
In this section, we take a closer look at DIRT data involving natural gas and telecommunications facilities, which as we saw in the Data Overview 2021 section are the leading types of facilities damaged. In this section, the full 2021 DIRT dataset (reported unique damages) is used, and telecom includes cable TV.