In this episode of the Pipeliners Podcast, Sarah Magruder Lyle of the Common Ground Alliance returns to discuss 811 Day and the latest insights from the annual DIRT report.

The conversation explores systemic challenges in underground utility damage prevention, including inconsistent regulations, outdated mapping, and underutilized technology. Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of the industry’s current state and what it will take to drive meaningful progress.

Common Ground Alliance 811 Day and latest DIRT Report Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms:

• Sarah K. Magruder Lyle is President & CEO of the Common Ground Alliance (CGA). Connect on LinkedIn.
  • Common Ground Alliance (CGA) is a member-driven organization dedicated to preventing damage to underground utility infrastructure and protecting those who live and work near these important assets through the shared responsibility of its stakeholders.  
• 811 (Contact Before You Dig) is the federally designated contact-before-you-dig number, designed to make the notification step of the safe excavation process as easy as possible. A person is required to contact 811 at least a few days before beginning any excavation or digging projects to allow time for locators to mark the approximate location of any buried infrastructure before excavation begins. Prior to the implementation of 811, people who dug had to know one call center’s 800 numbers, or notify utilities individually.
• PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) is responsible for providing pipeline safety oversight through regulatory rulemaking, NTSB recommendations, and other important functions to protect people and the environment through the safe transportation of energy and other hazardous materials.
• The Damage Prevention Institute (DPI) is CGA’s newest arm, which creates an innovative opportunity for the industry to address systemic inefficiencies in the damage prevention process through a metrics-focused, peer-reviewed model of shared accountability that serves all stakeholders.
• CGA’s Damage Information Reporting Tool (DIRT) is a data repository that collects critical information about underground damage and near-miss reports. DIRT data is used to produce targeted recommendations to damage prevention stakeholders about how to best protect buried facilities.
• 50-in0-5 initiative is focused on reducing damages by 50 percent over five years.
• The Damage Prevention Action Center, also led by Sarah Magruder Lyle but an organization that is independent of CGA, is a newly launched nonprofit advocating for public policies and industry practices that protect our Nation’s critical underground utility infrastructure and those who work and live near these important assets.
• Root Cause: The underlying reason an incident occurred, used in the DIRT report to categorize and address primary contributors to utility damages (e.g., failure to notify, locator error, improper excavation).
• Tolerance Zone: A defined area around a marked underground facility where excavation must be done with care, often by hand, to avoid damaging the facility. The width of the zone varies by state or jurisdiction.
• Locator Error: A root cause listed in the DIRT report indicating damage occurred due to a facility being marked incorrectly or not marked at all by a utility locator.
• Mapping Problem / Incorrect Facility Map Record: Inaccuracies in utility maps that misrepresent the location of underground assets, contributing to locator and excavation errors.
• GIS (Geographic Information System) Mapping: A digital technology used to capture, store, analyze, and display spatial data related to underground infrastructure.
• Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR): A non-invasive geophysical method used to detect and map underground utilities and anomalies, recommended to improve locating accuracy.
• RTK Locator (Real-Time Kinematic Locator): A high-precision GPS-based locator system that integrates with GIS platforms to improve the accuracy of underground utility records.
• Potholing: A practice in excavation where small test holes are dug by hand or vacuum equipment to physically verify the location of underground utilities before full excavation.
• Exemption (811 Notification Exemption): Legal carve-outs that allow certain excavators or types of work to bypass 811 notification requirements, often leading to confusion and increased risk of damage.
• PIPES Act (Pipeline Inspection, Protection, Enforcement, and Safety Act): Federal legislation that regulates pipeline safety, used as a reference point for damage prevention efforts in the oil and gas sector.
• BEAD Program (Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment): A federal program referenced indirectly, related to the rapid expansion of broadband infrastructure, which increases excavation activities and risk of underground utility damage.
• Excavator Clearance: The practice of maintaining a safe distance from marked utility lines during excavation, required after verifying facility location through potholing or other methods.
• Third-Party Damage: Damage caused to a utility by an external party (e.g., contractor or excavator) rather than the utility owner themselves.
• 50 in 5 Program: A CGA initiative launched in 2023 to challenge the industry to reduce underground utility damages by 50% within five years, using a defined index to track progress.
  • Index (in 50 in 5): A CGA-created metric, based on a 0–100 scale, used to measure annual progress toward reducing damages, where a score of 50 represents a 50% reduction from the 2022 baseline.
• Daylighting: The act of exposing a buried utility to view, usually by careful digging, before excavation proceeds. Often a safety precaution near known critical assets.
• Heal the Maps: An industry term referring to the process of updating and correcting facility maps to ensure accurate records of underground utility locations.
• Third-Party Enforcement: The application of legal or regulatory action by authorities to enforce damage prevention rules, often at the state level, especially when 811 rules are violated.

Common Ground Alliance 811 Day and latest DIRT Report Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat: Welcome to the “Pipeliners Podcast”, Episode 400, sponsored by Intersys Corporation, providers of POEMS, the Pipeline Operations Excellence Management System, operations and compliance software for the pipeline operator to address safety program management, control room management, and field operations. Find out more about POEMS at IntersysCorp.com.

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Announcer: The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, bubba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations. Now your host, Russel Treat.

Russel: Thanks for listening to The Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time, and to show the appreciation, we give away a customized Yeti tumbler to one listener every episode. This week, our winner is Darren Folk with Miller Pipeline. To learn how you can win this signature prize, stick around till the end of the episode.

This week, Sarah Magruder Lyle rejoins the podcast to talk about the Common Ground Alliance 811 Day and their latest DIRT report. Sarah Magruder Lyle, welcome back to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Sara Magruder Lyle: Hi, Russell. How are you? Thanks for having me.

Russel: I’m so glad to have you, and I’m so glad we’re coming back to 811 Day. In celebration of August 11th, we’ve asked you to come back on and give us an update. Before we dive in, if you would, tell us a little bit about the CGA and your role there.

Sarah: I’m the president and CEO of the Common Ground Alliance. The Common Ground Alliance is dedicated to preventing damage to our underground utility infrastructure, and protecting those who live and work near these critically important assets, through the shared responsibility and accountability of all of our stakeholders.

We’re a member-driven association of nearly 4,000 damage prevention professionals. We span from locators, excavators, facility owner operators, insurance, and everybody in between who’s involved in damage prevention.

Russel: One of the things I always talk about, and my friend Larry Shelton talks about this as well, he’s the gentleman who shares his story about Bellingham, is that we as pipeliners in particular have a unique responsibility in critical infrastructure because our assets run in people’s neighborhoods and backyards. That makes us unique versus other kinds of process industries.

I know that you represent a lot more than just pipeliners. You’re representing water utilities, cable companies, phone companies, and everybody that’s got buried infrastructure. Our buried infrastructure is a little bit different than some of that other stuff because of what can happen when you break it.

Sarah: Indeed. One of the challenges is oil and gas is the only federally regulated underground utility that you mentioned. We often forget that the others that are operating around us don’t have to follow the same rules as we do because they are regulated at the state level only.

Russel: Yeah, we’re going to talk about that a little bit because that causes some interesting challenges for damage prevention.

Sarah: Very much so.

Russel: Yeah. Catching up, I know you guys do a DIRT report every year. Can you give us a little update on your DIRT report? What are you learning?

Sarah: The DIRT report is telling us that we have had some very consistent root causes over the past several years due to the very inconsistent rules and regulations that we are asking the damage prevention industry to follow across the country.

What this really means is this inconsistency reinforces this inconsistent patchwork of laws and this consistent and persistent problem of the root causes that we’re seeing, especially not calling 811, which is still the number one cause of damage.

Something that we really need to think about as we approach August 11th, that we really have to double down on what we’re doing here. We really have to double down on that.

Russel: Well, let’s back up a little bit. For some of the listeners that maybe haven’t heard you before, what is the DIRT report, and how is it put together?

Sarah: The DIRT report is the Damage Information Reporting Tool. The Common Ground Alliance is the only organization that collects damage information from all stakeholders. As you noted, not just oil and gas, but water, sewer, fiber, power, telecom, excavators, locators.

We try to get the information from as many sources as possible because the more data we have, the better off we are. Certainly, we get the question, “What happens if more than one stakeholder reports the same incident?” We have ways to look at that and make sure that we’re only counting them once.

Russel: How many entities are submitting data, approximately, just to give people an idea of scale? What you guys do, it’s a big deal.

Sarah: It is significant because you’re talking…We have small companies that are very small employers, from one to nine, to very large companies that are brand names that we all know across the country. It is a wide variety of organizations and entities. We spend a lot of time looking at that data and making sure that we’re looking at it in a way where we’re comparing apples to apples.

Russel: Sarah, you mentioned root causes. What are you consistently seeing in the root causes? What are the primary causes for damages?

Sarah: Number one is still failure to call 811. That’s a big challenge. “No notification made to the One Call Center” is how it is listed in the DIRT report. That a quarter of our damages are still attributable to that, it is a big challenge.

When we look at the broader world of all diggers, unfortunately, landscapers bear a lot of the responsibility in that group. If we look at utility work only, water and sewer is creating a real challenge there.

Russel: I want to dig into that a little bit and make sure I understand your answer. It makes sense to me that landscapers would be a challenge. They typically are fairly small companies. They don’t have a lot of corporate structure, policy, procedure, those kinds of things. That makes sense. Can you unpack for me a little bit? You’re saying water utilities. How does that manifest?

Sarah: If we look at, again, utilities only, water and sewer are the largest group in that 25 percent that don’t call 811. The challenge there is, again, now we’re starting to talk about facilities that are regulated at the state level. If you look at natural gas, in that group, it’s by far the smallest. They know they have to call.

Russel: That would make sense to me because they have a whole bunch of rules they have to follow. There’s punitive things that could happen if they don’t follow them.

Sarah: We’ve been talking a lot, especially at the state level, about what’s exempt, who’s exempt. It’s the activities that are exempt which causes a lot of confusion. If you’re only digging three inches or six inches or you’re doing A, B, C, and D…Creates a lot of confusion, particularly for people who are working in multiple states. The tolerance zone is different. The wait time is different.

A couple of years ago, I did a PSA here, where I live, in the Virginia, DC, Maryland area. I couldn’t even say, “Wait two days” or “Wait two business days” because Maryland, Virginia, and DC are all different. Think about the companies who are operating here in the “tri-state” area. I’m saying “tri-state” in quotes. Think of the people who work in multiple states like that.

Russel: In certain areas, certain cities, you can be working in multiple states just within the city. In Texas, I know that some of these rules are governed not at the state level, but at the public utility level.

[crosstalk]

Russel: It could be county or city. It’s like trying to understand the liquor laws in Texas.

Sarah: Have fun with that. This patchwork of inconsistent laws is setting up the damage prevention professionals for failure. We’re making it harder to do an already hard job. The best practices, CGA’s “Best Practices,” which are agreed on by all of our stakeholder groups as the best practice, is a document of consistency if the states would look to them and adopt them.

Missouri, last month, the governor signed into law a bill that actually incorporates best practices into their state law.

Russel: They actually are taking the CGA Best Practices and saying, “This is what we’re going to do in our state.”

Sarah: It has been referenced in the state law.

Russel: Awesome.

Sarah: If the Missouri state law, if there’s a conflict between best practices and the state law, state law wins, but it’s a huge incremental success for damage prevention if the excavators and locators and facility owner-operators and everybody operating around them in the Missouri, Illinois, Indiana area, or whatever tri-state know that, “I at least know I have to do this.”

Russel: The more you can be consistent, the better you can perform. We’ve talked about the primary root cause, which is failure to notify. What’s the next most frequent root cause?

Sarah: If you look at the next root cause, it is “Excavator failed to maintain clearance after verifying marks.” The number two piece of equipment that’s responsible for a damage, after a backhoe, is a hand shovel. Once we have them marked, we have to be careful.

Some of that can be attributed to a difference in tolerance zones. Again, there’s a lot of things that we’re making even harder than it already is.

Russel: The method of the practice you have to follow to perform the dig is different depending on where you’re doing the dig.

Sarah: The next two after that are…It’s really the end part that I want to focus on, which is “Facility not marked due to locator error” and “Marked inaccurately due to locator error.” If you think about who is actually putting in these root causes, you’ve got people in the field doing this.

We suspect that those marked due to locator error could be masking part of what we know is a mapping problem, an accuracy problem. If you’re out in the field and it wasn’t marked where it was supposed to be, you’re going to say it’s the locator’s fault, whereas it may not be.

[crosstalk]

Sarah: The locator may just be operating off the map he has.

Russel: The locator may have put the mark based on the map, but the map was not right. That raises some really interesting questions about what is it really going to take to improve performance here.

The failure to notify and then marking errors and failure to main clearance. The marking errors and the failure to main clearance could all be…It’s hard to know how much of that is related to inconsistent practice or incorrect owner records.

Sarah: Again, there’s no silver bullet here that’s going to fix this. It’s a systemic problem that we’ve been talking about for a very long time. As our underground world gets more congested, the 18, 24-inch tolerance zone is going to be a challenge. You could have a lot of infrastructure in that tolerance zone.

You’re taking a big risk if we are not using the technologies that we have, like GIS mapping, like ground-penetrating radar, using the tools that we have. We’re really going to have to make a real wholesale change about how we’re looking at the cost of what a project costs.

It’s always hard to quantify what you’ve avoided. It’s always hard to use the “what you’ve avoided” part as the monetary reason to do something. That’s why…

Russel: It’s hard to quantify safety performance and put a financial number on it. That’s very, very true, but it’s a real number.

Sarah: It is a real number.

Russel: That’s what insurance underwriters do. They’re very good at it.

Sarah: The damage prevention industry and the leadership within the industries that are part of that are really going to have to think about, “Are we committed to making a change?” It’s not just oil and gas that has to make the change. We use the PIPES Act a lot to try to get that additional regulation in there, but everybody’s got to play.

The only level set right now is the PIPES Act. We just have to do a better job at the state level. Frankly, that’s why the industry formed the Damage Prevention Action Center. If we want to have a different outcome, we can’t just keep doing what we’re doing. We have to go advocate for consistency in these state laws.

That’s why, at the beginning of last year, the Damage Prevention Action Center was launched. It’s completely separate from the Common Ground Alliance. I’m the Executive Director of the Damage Prevention Action Center.

Our goal is to make sure that we are trying to address these systemic challenges at the state level with effective and balanced enforcement across all stakeholder groups. You can have the best law in the world. If nobody’s enforcing it, it doesn’t matter.

We have to get rid of the exemptions for 811 notification and participation. We have to incentivize facility owners and operators to heal their maps and provide that information in a timely manner to excavators.

If we know more about the damages that are happening, then we know more about what we can do to fix them. Mandatory reporting of damages, and the state laws have to reflect best practices.

Russel: I’m reflecting as you’re talking, Sarah. We’ve been doing this annual episode about four years now. I’m reflecting on what I was hearing you talk about four years ago versus where you are now.

What’s interesting to me is, four years ago, you were really starting to…This is my perspective just listening to the conversation. This may not be accurate — but it felt like there had been a lot of progress made in the 10 years prior, but it feels like since that time, the progress has flattened somewhat. There’s a little bit of chasing, if you will, what is the action that we can do that will actually help to move the needle?

Sarah: The easy parts are gone, and they’ve been gone. The call before you dig, make sure you dig with care, all of the things that are in the best practices that were in the initial part and that were added in the first few years, those are the easy pieces. Now, we’re talking about hard stuff.

The technology has changed. Programs like BEAD weren’t even a thing when CGA started in the first best practices that were out there, neither were cell phones. Not to the extent that they are now, not smartphones. A lot has changed.

There’s a lot of opportunity for us to address the hard parts of damage prevention, but we have to do it. We have to agree that we’re going to do it, not just talk about it.

Russel: Before we got on the microphone, I asked you a question about what’s out there in the way of promising tech. I was asking about ground penetrating radar, and you made the comment that, “Well, we already have it.” You’ve already talked about it a little bit here today.

What do you think is holding up industry from rethinking the way they do locating and digging, like using some of this newer technology like ground penetrating radar?

Sarah: Change is always hard, even if it’s for the better. The way that we look at projects has to change. The way that we look at the cost and the ROI and the value, we have to rethink that.

The damage prevention piece is often an afterthought. We don’t think about it until something happens, or the damage prevention piece isn’t part of the consideration of the initial contract. Everybody thinks about it when there’s a dig in and there’s an ignition, or, “We’ve cut off communication to the 911 center,” or you can’t get a call into the police station, it ends up being the reactive response. We have to make damage prevention in the proactive part of when we’re thinking about these projects.

Russel: The thing that’s interesting to me about this conversation, I clearly come from a pipeliner’s mindset, that when I’m thinking about damage prevention, I’m typically thinking about gas utilities and the challenge they’re up against.

But the challenge is not so much the gas utilities. It’s the other utilities that are operating under different rules, and the contractors that are working with those other utilities that are working under different rules.

Sarah: It is. Again, I come from oil and gas as well, but I’ve also been to some pretty large fiber installations.

You’re standing on a street where kids are riding bikes and parents are pushing strollers down the street, and you’re going, “Wow, we have an exposed gas line right here that the excavator has daylighted before they put their fiber in.” You start going, “Huh. Wow.” It could be bad really fast if what we have, the information, is incorrect.

Russel: The other thing we’re doing, too, is we’re putting more of the infrastructure underground.

Sarah: That’s right. I have been to more than a few conferences this year. We need every molecule of energy. We’re going to need all this energy for the additional power we need, for the data centers we need to run AI. Nowhere in there are we talking about damage prevention.

It’s great if we want to underground it for resilience and liability, but if we don’t know where it is and we’re digging into it, we’re not really helping our course. It’s the same with undergrounding electric. We want to protect it from natural disasters, and floods, and hurricanes, but third-party damages are the number one cause of damage to underground infrastructure.

Russel: Yeah. It’s different, though, because that tends to be, not always, but tends to be more localized, where a weather event tends to impact more people, but the…Well, let me pivot again.

Last year, we talked about your 50 in 5 program. Where is 50 in 5? What’s going on with that? Maybe give us an update on what the program is and where CGA is at with 50 in 5.

Sarah: A little bit of background. In 2023, the CGA board decided they wanted to challenge the industry to reduce damages by 50 percent in five years.

We created an index, so we were trying to compare, again, apples to apples about where we are. 2022 is year zero, so 2023 was year one. The index is on a scale of  to 100, which means we would need to get to the number 50 to get to reach our goal. The first year was 94. The DIRT report is going to tell us that year two, 2024, is at 96.7.

Russel: That’s not good.

Sarah: Not the right direction.

Russel: [laughs]

Russel: No. That’s not good.

Sarah: There’s more construction out there. There’s more infrastructure being put in. Are we going to resign ourselves to more digging means more damages? We shouldn’t. It’s not a foregone conclusion that that has to be the equation. It shouldn’t be at all.

Russel: What’s I always think what’s good about a program like 50 in 5 is you’re actually establishing a target and a basis for measurement and a way to say, “OK, here’s how we did in the last year.” Often, for any project like this, that’s the hardest part.

Sarah: That index number is consistent with incoming tickets and transmissions. It’s the wrong direction. Just because those numbers are going up does not mean the damages should be going up. we can’t keep doing what we’re doing and expect a different outcome.

Russel: We’ve talked about the need to normalize practice as it exists in law at the state and local level, and talking about the CGA best practices and mechanism for doing that. If you were king of the world, what is the next biggest thing that you would have people do to reduce damages?

Sarah: Heal their maps as quickly as they can. We just have to have consistent [inaudible] . 40 percent of the damages are to natural gas. They are to natural gas. About 50 percent are to telecom. The number that always everybody snickers a little bit, but telecom damages telecom the most when it is doing telecom work. And it has been that way.

That’s the problem about thinking about just one facility and operate in your own silo because natural gas is being adversely affected. It’s unacceptable that 40 percent of the damages are to natural gas, and they’re not being caused by natural gas. We have to rethink how we’re looking at the whole equation. And change is hard.

Russel: I agree with that. I think job one is to get the maps updated. You have a lot of conversation about what’s the mechanisms to make the outcome of performing the work, a more accurate map. With smartphones, and GIS, and the tech we have available to us, that ought to get easier.

I’m aware of some utilities and some of the projects they’re doing to improve that. I know we’re making progress there, but we need a lot more.

Sarah: There’s a couple of things I want to address. There is often this concern. Well, a few. One is that there’s a security issue. We don’t want the maps out there for everybody to see, which is not what we’re advocating.

However, if you want to find a natural gas pipeline, I can go right out here on the street and find the big yellow markers and pretty much figure out where it goes down the whole street.

Russel: It’s not that hard.

Sarah: It’s not that hard. Some of the big lines, you can even see on Google Maps. We need to put that aside. There is another concern that if we give the excavator maps, they’re not going to call 811. We’re not advocating that you have access to anything unless you do call 811. The point is that if you have a valid ticket number and you’re working in a said area…

Russel: Something that you could geofence.

Sarah: why wouldn’t you want that excavator to know that your asset is there, even if it isn’t completely accurate? That’s why we have a tolerance zone. If you ask most excavators, they will say, “If I know it’s on this side of the street, I’m not doing anything till I find it, till I know it’s there.”

They’re the ones putting their lives on the line every day. They’re the ones putting the shovel in the ground. Again, we have to rethink it.

Russel: We got to rethink how we’re using the technology and how we equip. Who’s going to give us the best data about where stuff actually is? It’s going to be the excavator.

Being able to collect data from every excavation that gives you precise location and to know, in my mapping, that that was a dig and that’s a precise location versus my other mapping that is based on older maps, that whole conversation about how do I get the data and make it better just as a process of interacting with it, there’s some big opportunity there.

Sarah: There are, and there are some big challenges.

Russel: There’s people making progress there.

Sarah: Do I depend on an excavator that’s working for a different utility who tells me that they found my line someplace else? I get it. Probably a red flag. You probably need to go figure it out. That’s a big risk. That’s a known risk. The idea that the risk is more with giving somebody a map that may not be completely accurate doesn’t negate the risk of them not knowing it’s there at all.

Russel: To me, this is the whole workflow interaction with the data. There’s a big opportunity there. The other big opportunity is we’ve got to figure out how to incorporate ground-penetrating radar into dig activity. That should become not a best practice, but a standard practice.

Sarah: There are definitely some case studies out there where it’s been used, or even RTK locators that have GIS mapping capabilities on them. It doesn’t have to be GPRS. There are other technologies where we can put them to a map.

It depends on soil and geography and depth and where you are. There’s a lot of variables, but, again, there are a variety of technologies. We see them at our conference every year. They can help us do this if we want to, but we have to actually want to take the actions.

Russel: We have to understand the value proposition and how to integrate it into work. Whenever I’m talking about product commercialization, one of the things I tell people is whatever it costs you to get the prototype built, you’re going to spend two to three times that to get it to market.

You’ve got to help the companies modify their internal policy and procedure to incorporate that technology into their work. You’ve got to help them get everybody trained to do that new work. That often takes more time and effort and money than the original development of the tech.

Sarah: The top 10 root causes that we have in the report make up 85 percent of the damages reported.

Russel: What is theme in those top 10?

Sarah: What I can tell you is there is no root cause there that we can’t address with the technology and the know-how we currently have. We’ve already talked about the first four.

The other one…Improper excavation not listed elsewhere. The excavator dug prior to verifying marks by potholing. Facility not marked due to no response. Excavator failed to shore support facilities. Marks faded, lost, or maintained. Facility not marked due to incorrect facility map record. They’re all interconnected with the same challenges.

Russel: That’s actually what I was driving at. It all goes to we have technology, but we don’t have it deployed the way we need to have it deployed. It’s not become just the standard way we do work. That’s what’s going to be required to get a step change in damage prevention performance. That’s a great way to wrap up this conversation.

Before we leave, I have to ask you, what cool stuff are you doing this year to celebrate 811 Day?

Sarah: I will be doing some local TV with Washington Gas, which will be exciting. We usually do a social media push that says, “What are you doing?” 811 Day is an opportunity for all of our stakeholders to show us what they’re doing to really highlight 811 Day. I do have a special birthday. My nephew is an 8/11 baby. He thinks that everything 811…It’s his birthday on his shirt.

Russel: That is awesome.

Sarah: It definitely is.

Russel: That is just awesome.

Sarah: It’s my goddaughter’s son. He’s going to think that 811 day is this whole big pomp and circumstance.

Russel: It’s all done just for him. That is fantastic.

Sarah: All just for him.

Russel: That is fantastic. Listen, I appreciate you taking the time to catch us up on what’s going on at CGA. This is a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate the work you guys are doing. I hope that pipeliners find this of value.

As we always do, we will create show notes and links. We’ll link up to some CGA resources. If you want to get a copy of the DIRT report and understand what it’s saying, we’ll make that available.

Sarah: For those of you that are here in the DMV area, you will probably hear my voice on some radio PSAs. We’re really trying to push the word out here and make sure that everybody remembers why it’s so important to call 811.

Russel: Absolutely. Again, thanks, Sarah. I appreciate you. I appreciate all the work you’re doing.

Sarah: Thanks so much, Russel.

Russel: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with Sarah. Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast YETI tumbler. Simply visit pipelinepodcastnetwork.com/win and enter yourself in the drawing.

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If you have ideas, questions, or topics you’d be interested in, please let me know on the Contact Us page at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.