Page 6 - Tennessee 811 Magazine 2021 Issue 4

By Jason Kouba
Damage Prevention Liaison Tennessee811
Let’s talk about late tickets,
shall we? With ticket volume increases across the country, staffing shortages among contract locating companies and utilities alike, how can we work through this issue? As a Liaison with Tennessee 811, receiving a call regarding locates not being completed is, unfortunately, not an uncommon occurrence. But what is the answer?
Tennessee is on pace to process more than a million tickets across the state by the end of the year. As of October 31, 2021, we have processed 871,831 locate requests with 87,398 of those in that month alone. I know what you are thinking: “Okay, so there are a lot of tickets, why not just hire more people?” If only it was that easy!
Has anyone been to restaurant lately and seen now hiring signs? How
about a retail store? Anybody seen a business change their business hours due to staff shortages? Has anybody been trying to fill a position within your own company? Now, I am not going to pretend like this is the only contributing factor as we have had late locate requests prior to the pandemic and the current times, but I can assure you that it is a contributing factor currently. I have talked with hiring managers for contract locate companies in Tennessee that have told me that they have been trying to hire folks for over a year. Not only that, but they also struggle to get applicants to show up for interviews. If they get folks to show up to interviews, they don’t show up on day one of training and then the cycle continues.
I can speak from experience in saying that locating is not for everyone. I have spent my fair share of time interviewing and hiring locators across the country.
4 • Tennessee811 2021, Issue 4
Late Locates
Locating is not as easy as some of the locators out there make it look. It can be a fast paced, everchanging, high stress career. But on the other hand, it can be a very rewarding career for the right person.
to several projects starting at the same time, multiple miles long fiber projects going on at the same time, or complete system upgrades by utilities and road projects that last months.
So this brings us to, “What can be done to help the situation?” Let’s first look at these projects and what contractors and or utilities can do to help ensure they get their locates completed on time. The first step is getting the locators involved early on in your project. This means before any excavation is planned and you are looking at doing a project, reach out to the contract locators and let them know that you have a large project coming up. The sooner the better. Even if it is not enough time for them to hire additional folks, they will be able to start planning on how to get resources to your project. Working with the locators throughout the project can ensure you always have fresh marks
on the ground as you complete your digging.
Think about what you are calling in
for your project. Once a locate request is processed, locators have a legal obligation to mark what is on that ticket, whether it’s one ticket requesting 200 feet or 20 tickets each requesting 2,000 feet on both sides of the road. They all must be marked within 72 business hours in Tennessee. So, look at your locate requests and think about whether or not you have more area on your ticket than is needed, or maybe more area requested than you will be able to complete in 15 calendar days.
The last thing to think about in reference to locate requests is the update process. When you are working a large project, do you update your entire project until it is complete? A lot of times, as a project progresses, the contractor will continue to update sections of the project that are already
So why can’t they just hire more people? Without getting too far into the weeds, I will simply say that they are trying. The locating industry is unique in that when a company is trying to staff up, you
are up against an unknown in that you don’t know what your workload will look like day to day, and unlike a lot of industries you have a legal obligation to get the work you receive completed in a set amount of time with no wiggle room. Most companies will look at past ticket volume trends as well as volume increases year over year to make their best guess on how many technicians they may need. What they can’t account for is large ticket volume spikes due