The board is also considering changing the billing method to an allocation methodology. The board heard comments from members at the special meeting and Annette Reburn, Executive Director of Alabama 811 discussed their experience when converting to the allocation method. More discussion on this topic is planned and several members have offered their rate experts to help determine the allocation method that would be most equitable and fair as we move forward on this task.

The new NM811 building nears completion; 95% of the work has been done. The building is scheduled to be done the end of September and the call center staff is planning to move into the building over the Columbus Day holiday October 10, 2011, assuming the testing and vetting of all the new equipment is completed and no significant issues arise. You will want to mark your calendars as the NM811 staff has tentatively scheduled an “open house” of the new facility for Friday December 16, 2011, from 9am-3pm.

“We’re in an area that has many oil and gas companies,” said Daniel Engert, Northwest Area Manager for New Mexico Gas Company. “So we look for every opportunity to reach out to the public and take advantage of all the talent we have in our group.”

Engert is part of a sub-committee tasked with identifying opportunities to take the partnership’s safety message to audiences not previously reached. According to Engert, informing children about the dangers of above- and below-ground facilities is a national trend.

New Mexico Gas Company is an active member of the Four Corners Damage Prevention Group and Engert has taken on a leadership role in getting the message delivered to audiences of all age groups and responsibilities.

“We conduct about 14 safety conferences a year in the region,” said Engert. “And we invite excavators and emergency responders as well as others from the community to discuss issues concerning pipeline safety.” According to Engert, the annual conference in Farmington has approximately 300 attendees.

The elementary school program was added to the group’s schedule last year and 17 of the 26 Four Corners pipeline member companies participate in the new program.

“It definitely adds to our work load,” said Engert. “But we have several volunteers that are willing to provide their time to the students. So we are able to spread the load.” Engert believes that the investment of time will have huge benefits in the future. He also believes the message is more effective because the pipeline employees that present the safety information live and work in the communities where the students reside.
The Four Corners Damage Prevention Group knows their safety message can be more effectively delivered by the partnership rather than as individual companies. That’s one reason the Four Corners Damage Prevention Group took on the work.

“One of the difficulties of informing school children about well-sites and pipeline safety is getting in front of them,” Engert said. “It’s just not possible for every company that has facilities in the community to present a safety message to every school.” The Four Corners’ safety message is presented one time and the member companies share in the program and the cost.

The Four Corners group also developed a partnership with the “Hard Hat Harry” educational safety program created by Christy Grossheim of Treetop Promotions. “They have an excellent program about the dangers of oil field facilities,” said Engert. “We take Hard Hat Harry with us and he helps us present our 811 ‘Call Before You Dig’ message. The kids love him.”

The Four Corners partnership began scheduling time with school systems about two months ahead of the presentations. Engert said the partnership identified approximately 50 schools it wanted to visit. “We just assumed that all of them would be real eager to say yes to our request,” he said. “But we had about a 50-percent rejection rate.”

According to Engert, some of the larger school systems couldn’t honor the request because of a lack of time for the program. “We also learned that sometimes we weren’t talking to the right person.” Engert said the best opportunities came from smaller school systems and contacts with local superintendents or principals.
It was a good first year for the program. More than 20 schools said yes to the Four Corners’ request and the “Stay Away – Stay Alive” and “Call 811 Before You Dig” messages that were presented to the region’s most precious possession.

Engert said the group is working on a more helpful system for measuring the effectiveness of their program. “We’ve talked about developing a few written questions for the students and asking the teachers to compile the results and enter them into an on-line database,” he said. “We plan to offer a $25 gift card for each room that participates.”

“We hope to see the program continue to grow,” said Engert. “And we’re planning to have a great program next year. We are also excited about the possibilities of taking our safety message to high school students and maybe involving a high school television class in the production of the safety message.”
Working with elementary students was also educational for the Four Corners Damage Prevention Group. “We learned that the kids are quick to rat out their parents,” Engert said. “They didn’t hesitate to tell us that daddy put in a sprinkler system or did some other work and didn’t call 811. We’re pretty sure they’ll remind daddy to call next time.”

Recently, there has been quite a bit of discussion and confusion regarding jurisdictional facilities within the State of New Mexico. The New Mexico Public Regulation Commission Pipeline Safety Bureau (PSB) is responsible for ensuring intrastate natural gas and hazardous liquid pipelines are operated and maintained in compliance with state and federal regulations. The key word is INSTRASTATE. If you own and/or operate a pipeline that is installed within and does not cross the state boundary, then I encourage you to contact the PSB office and we will discuss the possibility of meeting one of the following categories of definition:
Natural gas storage:

a) pipelines to and from natural gas storage facilities are regulated as transmission lines;
b) except for transmission lines and pipe-or-bottle-type holders, natural gas storage facilities are currently not regulated under Part 192; and
c) transmission lines are considered storage facilities.
Regulated natural gas pipelines include:
a) Gathering lines in Class 2, 3 and/or 4 locations;
b) Transmission lines in all class locations; and
c) Distribution lines, including LPG systems serving 10 or more service
lines, or those in which a portion of the system is located in a public place.
Hazardous liquid storage:
a) breakout tanks are regulated under Part 195
b) storage caverns are jurisdictional but currently not regulated under Part 195
Regulated hazardous liquid pipelines include:
a) Any pipeline that transports a highly volatile liquid (HVL), such
as propane or natural gas liquids;
b) Transportation through any
pipeline, other than a gathering
line, that has a maximum
operating pressure (MOP) greater
than 20% of the specified
minimum yield strength;
c) Any pipeline segment that
crosses a waterway currently used
for commercial navigation;
d) Transportation of petroleum in
any of the following onshore
gathering lines:
1. A pipeline located in a non-rural area;
2. Low stress gathering lines of 6” or more in diameter that
are within ¼ mile of an
unusually sensitive area
e) Any pipeline that transports a
hazardous liquid or carbon dioxide
through a low-stress pipeline
or segment of pipeline that 1) is in
a non-rural area or 2) meets the
criteria defined in § 195.12 (a)
f) For purposes of the reporting
requirements in subpart B, a rural
low-stress pipeline of any
diameter

Feel free to email me at jasonn.montoya@state.nm.us or call me at (505) 476-0253 if you would like further clarification.

You are four independent companies: (1) the one call system, (2) locator, (3) excavator, and (4) utility. So are you a team or not? Regardless of how you answer that question, participants at a recent focus group at the TX811 Summit advanced the notion that the stakeholders could do a lot more to help each other be successful. One participant went so far as to say, “We do a good job at beating on each other.”

There are a lot of differences between the stakeholders. As independent companies, you have different owners and each of you has your own goals along your journey to be financially successful. What you do is different. You’ve got issues within your company that the other entities are not aware of and you might argue don’t need to be aware of. You’ve got your set of personnel issues and struggle to maximize the use of resources.

Let’s address another question — what do you have in common? You want to be profitable, you provide a livelihood to employees and their families, you have common people issues, etc. More specifically, you interact in the same industry. The question is do these commonalities make you a team?
Before answering that question, let’s list the basic characteristics of a team.

1. Members have a common vision and goal.
2. Each member knows their roles and responsibilities to achieve.
3. Each member proactively meets/exceeds the expectations of other team members.
4. Each member gives and receives feedback.
5. There is an accountability system to keep members working to achieve a common goal.

Let’s consider the impact of a common vision and goal. Having worked within organizations as a consultant the past 20 + years, I know that having a common vision and goal are critical for members within a team or departments within the same company to feel as one team. A vision and goal provide direction so employees know where you are going and what is to be achieved. They provide employees a purpose and give meaning to their work. People like feeling like an integral part of something larger than themselves. Consequently, your employees will be more loyal, have a higher morale, and will be more productive when they feel as though everyone in your company is striving to achieve the same vision and common goals.

In your case, you are independent companies working together under the umbrella of damage prevention. You may not have sat around a conference table to define your common vision and goal, but it seems logical to assume that you should have a common vision to prevent damages. Could we be so bold as to say that the glue that binds you independent stakeholders together is the goal to prevent damages? If so, it would seem logical that each of you is a member of an overall damage prevention team.

If you agree, that sets the stage for you to help each other succeed rather than each of you going off in different directions with little regard for other stakeholders. Chris Ernst and Donna Chrobot-Mason report the same in their recent book, Boundary Spanning Leadership (2011). Common sense dictates that we ought to help each other to be successful. Would you agree?

Let’s look at this issue from another perspective. As I’ve said, WHAT each of you does is different. Consequently HOW you do what you do is different. If I were to ask you “WHY” you do what you do, you may respond to “make a profit.” In reality, though, profit is a by-product of successfully completing your job responsibilities so that the excavator works safely. The logical conclusion is that the common WHY among you independent companies is to prevent damages by helping people work safely.

I’m out of space so the next time we’ll continue our discussion of being members of a damage prevention team.

Cartography, the art of mapmaking, known today as GIS (geographic information systems) is the method of determining where we are on this world and helps us go in the right direction to our destination. Maps don’t just show your position; they show the position of other places and things relative to your position. The more information a map can show, the better you can determine which way to go and know you’re going to get there.

The New Mexico One Call mapping database is comprised of many layers of information. There are layers for streets and addresses, township and range, city and county boundaries, waterways, railroads and even mile markers along the major highways. Each one of these pieces of information can be attached to a GPS (Global Positioning System) point. There is virtually nothing we cannot find on our map – so long as we have enough correct information.

GPS coordinates can be used to describe any point on Earth. The lines of latitude, (the lines that run horizontally on a globe and show how far north or south you are) and the lines of longitude, (the lines that run vertically and show how far east and west you are) have been used by sailors and others since the Renaissance and are still used today by navigators of land, sea and air, as well as outdoorsman and emergency responders. Latitude and longitude is the basis for the GPS navigators you can install in your car that help you get to your destination. Many of the latest generation mobile phones also have GPS technology.

When calling in a locate request, an excavator can provide several different types of information that will allow our system to determine the correct facility owners to notify. For example, an excavator can provide an address on a street, an intersection, or GPS coordinates. Addressing information comes from municipalities and counties that use GIS to maintain their street information. Updating addresses is a continuous process as our cities and communities are always growing and sometimes we may not have the most current data. In rural areas, this is especially true. In fact, there may be a well-known road that has yet to appear in our system. The reason could be that it has not yet been entered into a GIS system and/or has not been made available to the one call center. For this reason, our operators will ask for additional information that helps to locate the area where an excavator intends to dig. More and more counties and municipalities are moving to using a GIS but others continue to use old paper maps.

As more information becomes available, the more versatile and flexible our map data can be. That makes creating a locate request for excavators easier and more accurate. It also helps reduce costs for underground facility owners (UFOs) because if we can provide specific information about a location, a UFO may not even have to be notified because it’s beyond the area where their underground lines are located.

THE SEVEN SEGMENT RULE

Here the seven segments are highlighted in purple. The segment in the middle is the one with the address. The intersecting street segments that surround are the other six. The underground utilities that the segments touch will be notified of the excavation.

If you don’t have access to GPS data, then the next best means of describing the location is an address along a street. If the dig site is at an address along a segment of road (the length of road from one intersection to the other) and that address is registered in our system, then the system will look up the area and automatically find the adjacent intersecting street segments on either side of that address. The seven segment notification ensures that every member near the address is notified – even the members that have facilities not on the street but in the alley. This notification can pick up members that are on the next block over rather, but in the absence of more precise data this is still a valid and safe notification for the excavator and the public.

QUALITY OF SOURCE DATA

One of the challenges of the one call center is to acquire the necessary data. NMOC purchases updated data every year from NAVTEQ, a mapping and navigation company. Since that information is licensed to us, there are limitations on how we can use the data. We supplement that information from what can be obtained publicly. Cities and counties that maintain their Enhanced 911 street data provide that data to the one call center for free, because it’s public information. But we cannot obtain the data for the entire state because not every community or county maintains the data in a format that we can use such as paper maps, as described earlier.

But what about GoogleMaps or MapQuest? Those resources on the internet are fine for general use and basic references. And some of the data is pretty good. But there are known errors. Some of them are pretty big. Road names are inconsistent and some of them are dead wrong. When you use these tools for general purposes, you either forgive or completely ignore the wrong data and can still get to where you’re going. Since we are in the business of damage prevention, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring data and it is critically important for the data we use to be as accurate as possible.

Some frustrated excavators, who are not fully familiar with the process we use for creating a ticket, tend think that because we cannot use online resources like Google and MapQuest we are behind the times. But as far as accuracy, our system far outshines them. And any time an operator creates a ticket, and finds a potential error, we have a process for reporting and eventually updating that information. If a caller says that the road they live on is misspelled in our system, the operator fills out a form describing the issue and sends that to the mapping department. I have called county assessors or municipal GIS admins to get the right spellings or updated names of roads many times. We have other processes for mitigating other errors found as well.

One of the biggest issues we’ve been seeing is that new subdivisions that have been in place for a few years still have not made it into a GIS in the first place. So for fast growing communities, when the information is lacking, excavators are asked for other information to determine the location. This can also contribute to the perception that the one call center data is inadequate. It may take as many as two or three years for that information to be updated. Another example for why online mapping resources cannot be relied on is the road data that they acquired might be what was originally planned by the developer. But changes in the plan may occur that slightly or totally alters the street geometry in real life. The subdivision gets constructed differently from what was planned so when you see the aerial photo and overlay the streets onto it, they don’t always match.

DRIVING DIRECTIONS and PLANNING

In the absence of the kind of information that can easily be punched into the system and letting the system respond with the location, we can also use pure driving instructions from known points that are in our system to find the location. This method of locating the dig site in our system can be tricky and has some very specific requirements in order to be accurate. If we come to the point in the map where we cannot follow the roads and all we see is empty space, we have to assume right angle turns when the instructions tell us to turn and follow for a distance.  This can become more and more inaccurate because we know that not all roads follow a perfect straight line grid – especially not in rural, forested or mountainous areas. If an excavator cannot provide information that describes very clearly how the road bends and how far to go, and is unable to provide any other information, then we will ask them to call back when they have the information to complete the ticket.

The information needed must be provided by the excavator and that information must be gathered before calling. This requires some planning from the excavator. Excavators that are committed to damage prevention find the time to plan out not just what is going to be done at the site, but record how to get there so that they can communicate that information to the one call center, which in turn communicates that to the facility owners in the area. If the excavator cannot communicate to the one call center how to get to a location, how can they expect the facility owners to get the site to mark it?

WHAT’S NEXT?

Moving forward into the foreseeable future, we would like to get to a point where we get the GPS information from the phone that the excavator is calling from (if he is at the dig site when he calls) and use that information to automatically populate the information on the ticket.  Then, half the work is done!

“This process has been a long, arduous endeavor, but very worthwhile in terms of ensuring we achieve our mission of providing notice of planned excavations to underground facility owners to protect lives, property and help them maintain critical water, power and communications infrastructure in our state with the highest level of quality and efficiency,” said Paula McAfee, president of the NMOC Board of Directors. She added, “We are very grateful to the staff of NMOC for the tremendous effort and hours of hard work they put in to achieve this important certification.”

NMOC’s ISO 9001:2008 quality management certification indicates the organization:

consistently provides services that meet the needs of its members and customers as well as comply with applicable statutory and regulatory requirements. The certification also recognizes that NMOC aims to enhance member and customer satisfaction through applying processes for continual improvement of its systems.

Gary Sloman, NMOC executive director, explained, “NMOC achieved a 98 percent customer satisfaction rating in our 2010 customer survey, the highest satisfaction rating in our history. The processes we have put in place in our pursuit of the ISO 9001:2008 certification are certainly working.”

ISO 9000 is a family of standards related to quality management systems designed to help organizations ensure they meet the needs of their customers. More than one million organizations worldwide are independently certified, making ISO 9001 one of the most widely used management tools in the world today. ISO 9001 was first published in 1987, but its origins can actually be traced back to 1969, when it was published as part of a series of quality standards and requirements by NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).

Established in 1990, NMOC offers a toll-free number (811) for dig notification, and provides free safety seminars to train excavators on digging safely. State law requires citizens to call before they dig – the service is free. NMOC handles calls from contractors or homeowners who are about to begin excavation projects. In turn, NMOC notifies underground facility owners that they need to mark any underground wires, cables or pipes within two working days, before any excavation begins.

NMOC currently has 20 employees and serves 430 members who own and operate more than 120,000 miles of underground water, wastewater and gas pipelines as well as electrical and telecommunication cables. The organization handles nearly 200,000 requests for line locates each year.

The Pipeline Safety Bureau (PSB), among other things is charged with the task of enforcing Federal and State Pipeline Safety Regulations in order to provide for the safety of the citizens of New Mexico and enforces the State Excavation Damage Prevention Law.

As the Bureau Chief, I am given the opportunity to speak to various organizations about the PSB and its primary goal of ensuring safety for people, property and the environment. I recently had the privilege to speak at the New Mexico One Call Annual Meeting. I joined with other industry professionals committed to providing world class services to our citizens while working together to protect our vital underground infrastructure and to promote public safety for all involved.

Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) evaluates our nation’s pipeline safety record annually. There is good news overall. When measuring pipeline incidents with death or major injury spanning from 1986 – 2010 there is a long-term trend showing an average of 10 percent decline every three years.

The same report states that excavation damage remains the leading cause of incidents for pipelines and is consistent with underground facility damages or failures. Statistics show that over the past ten years, excavation damage contributed to more than 30 percent of pipeline distribution incidents.

Clearly, this is unacceptable as a trend. That’s why the PSB is pleased to be a working partner with industry stakeholders across the state committed to uniting the industry to keep New Mexico a safer place to live and work.

There is no question but that the damage prevention stakeholders working together control our own destiny. We must determine where we want damage prevention to go and then ask ourselves the question, “How do we get there?”

You are going to hear a lot about HB 500 in the upcoming months. It is important to understand its impact at the state level. The requirement to immediately report damages will improve the process of investigation. Our intent is to review every damage reported to determine the root cause. We are currently developing tools to track statistics. The tools developed will allow for trending based on a number of criteria which will put us in a stronger position when enforcing excavation damage.

The bottom line for stronger enforcement has never been about increasing fines or generating revenue.  Our goal in New Mexico is simply to “change behavior.” We are convinced that effective enforcement will help ensure a safe and reliable pipeline operating system and will minimize underground facility damage.

I encourage you to join with us to take our damage prevention program to the next level.

Dig Safely New Mexico!