Page 9 - Tennessee 811 Magazine 2020 Issue 3

properly. David had some high praise for Heath Consultants, “I can’t say enough good things about Heath. We probably average in Middle Tennessee around 9,000 locate tickets a month.
If Heath were to miss 2 or 3 locates a month (and sometimes they don’t even miss that many), that’s a pretty good batting average. As I have told our own employees, if we were to locate our own lines we may have trouble matching that performance. I would say with any locate company, if you have that high of an average of tickets and you perform that well, you could not ask any more of them. Heath does a great job! They are like family to us.”
Atmos Energy and David both
really put a priority on safety. “One
of Atmos’ visions is to be the safest utility company there is. And one of their other visions is to provide great customer service. Without the safety part of it, you can’t provide great customer service.” Something else
David told me is that Atmos cares
about the safety of its employees.
Atmos employees do not work live
gas – they will either squeeze the gas off or turn the gas off at the valve. When a pandemic such as COVID-19
is not going on, David goes out and gives free safety meetings to excavators, municipalities and he also performs fire department trainings. David told me, “When we do these safety trainings, we actually feed these guys. Atmos does not mind spending a little money to make the area safe that we serve.”
At the beginning of 2020, Atmos rolled out a new damage prevention program for its employees. This new app-based program is called “Damage Prevention Ambassador” and it places a major focus on interacting with excavators in the field to prevent damaged gas lines. Every Atmos employee has the app on their phone. “From the President of this company down, if you are driving down the road and see someone digging, you stop at the jobsite. You do an audit;
you get their name and their ticket number. I can tell you that has really helped with damage prevention in every state we have facilities in. It makes
the excavator realize ‘I better have a locate request because an Atmos truck is going to stop.’ I could never take
all the credit for our numbers being reduced when it comes to damages. We have some great employees and we all work well together.” David also told
me that this app really has created a friendly competition amongst the Atmos employees, and the courtesy stops have helped create great relationships with excavators.
Something else David has been heavily involved in is turning in complaints
to the Tennessee Public Utility Commission (TPUC) for folks violating the state’s “dig law”. Some examples of these complaints are not having a locate request when performing excavation
or not using reasonable care (hand digging or potholing) in the tolerance zone when performing excavation. Since 2016, David has had a high success
rate with the hundreds of complaints he has turned in to TPUC. “When this enforcement process first started, we had to learn what information TPUC was looking for. I am fortunate that
we have some great employees that work for us. The big thing is to train our employees on what information
we need on any damage or if we have someone out digging without a locate request. One reason we have been
so successful is our employees are taking good pictures of the damage, equipment, the license plate number of a truck, and they also take a picture of folks at the job site. And we obviously will get all the required information
of the job location with the street number and name.” Atmos employees are coached on how to take pictures and to let those pictures tell the story and David tells me that having the necessary information is important for the paperwork.
Along with reporting complaints to TPUC, David tells me, “I will be honest with you, I really do not care if I win
a case or not. I just want to cause an inconvenience for an excavator who’s not digging safely. That way they are like, ‘Wow, this is serious, we do not need to do this no more.’ That is why we push very hard that you call 911 on every damage. We do that for every damage. We want to make it a big deal. When that excavator sees that police car, or the fire truck pull up and they have to sit there for a few hours they
will understand how serious this is.” I will tell you that David does not turn
in every complaint that he could. He
is fair to excavators and I experienced that first-hand on a job site where an excavator was scraping with a track hoe and David just stopped the equipment operator and educated him in an effort to prevent a damage.
Speaking of reducing damages, David went over some numbers from the
last seven years: “As a company,
we judge how well we are doing in damage prevention based on how many damages we have per 1,000 locate request tickets. In the Columbia, Franklin, and Murfreesboro areas, we were running 8-10 damages per 1,000 locates. Once we started using law enforcement, before the new law took effect in 2015, we were having people issued citations. The damage numbers started dropping. In the last year of that approach to enforcement, we
saw a dramatic drop off in damages. I was looking through May of this year and Murfreesboro is .75 per 1,000. Columbia and Franklin, which is combined, is 1.06 per 1,000. Let me repeat, that used to be 8-10 per 1,000 tickets. I remember when our goal was to get the damages down to 4
per 1,000, then it was to get it down
to 2, now we are getting them to less than 1 per 1,000 tickets. Right now, comparing 2020 to 2019 we are 80 damages down and the locate requests have gone up.”
I featured David Roberts in this article because of his commitment to damage prevention, safety, and building relationships with excavators. David’s hard work has raised the bar for the rest of our industry when it comes
to damage prevention and whether
he wants to admit it or not, David is
a big part of the reason why Atmos Energy has been successful in reducing their third-party damages in our state. Southern Middle Tennessee is David’s home and he cares about the different communities he works in and wants to keep them safe. David, you deserve this recognition and I’m proud to recognize you as this quarter’s Damage Prevention MVP.
2020, Issue 3 Tennessee811 • 7