The Call-Before-You-Dig System Set a Goal to Cut Damage in Half. The Damage Went Up Instead.

Every time someone digs — a homeowner setting a fence post, a crew trenching for fiber — the law requires a call to 811 first, so a locator can come out and mark whatever is buried underneath.▸ On April 9, 2025, in Lexington, Missouri, that happened exactly as designed. A subcontractor called 811 five days ahead of the job; a Liberty Utilities locator marked the lines. That evening, a drill struck a capped gas main more than three hours before the leak ignited. Per the National Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report, the section of main that was hit "was not identified or marked" during the locate at all — not marked wrong, simply missed. The explosion killed five-year-old Alistair Lamb and injured his father and sister. Every step of the process was followed. It failed anyway, and the numbers say that kind of failure is close to routine.

The Common Ground Alliance (CGA) — the trade association that runs the industry's shared damage-reporting system — told Congress in February 2025 that hitting buried gas, water, power and telecom lines during excavation "costs the U.S. a staggering $30 billion every year", counting repairs, service restoration, and the businesses and residents cut off while crews fix what broke.▸ That figure is the industry's own estimate, not an audited government number — there is no independent national accounting of the total. What is independently counted, damage event by damage event, is where the fault lies. CGA's 2024 DIRT Report puts it plainly: "Root cause distribution spans all major stakeholder groups — notification failures (26%), locating practices (34%) and excavation practices (33%)." No single group owns the problem.

Locators — the technicians who paint and flag where a line actually runs — are blamed for slightly more damage (34%) than the excavators who dig (33%), with failure to even call 811 in the first place a close third (26%).▸ That three-way split is why CGA's recommendations aren't aimed at one party: they call for enforceable standards on excavators, locators, and the utilities whose maps the locators work from.

None of that dollar figure is a staffing story in the way Social Security's is — there's no single federal payroll behind it.▸ But the system that's supposed to prevent the damage runs on a fixed process, built for a specific era, straining under a volume nobody designed it for.

The National Utility Locating Contractors Association — NULCA, the trade group for the companies whose technicians do the actual marking — put it starkly in a paper published this spring: the 811 system "was designed roughly fifty years ago for a world processing less than one million locate requests per year... That made sense in 1974." By CGA's own count, the U.S. system fielded 43,533,423 incoming locate requests in 2024 alone — generating nearly 265 million transmissions to the utilities that have to respond to each one.▸ The architecture, NULCA argues, has not changed to match: the same free-to-excavators, first-come queue built for a fraction of the volume.

That strain shows up as delay.▸ Analyzing data from eight 811 centers, the 2024 DIRT Report found excavators faced an average 38% chance of being unable to start work on schedule because a locate response was incomplete — a coin flip that, NULCA argues, quietly erodes the incentive to call 811 at all, since waiting on a locator often means missing a deadline anyway. And the money behind the labor is thin relative to the job: NULCA cites one case of "a major Midwest utility" budgeting $15 million for a year of locating services, then running it through "a procurement process designed to squeeze another 15% out of it" — a contract, the group argues, that guarantees an underfunded locating company, overloaded technicians, and turnover that puts undertrained locators back in the field within weeks.

The $30 billion damage-cost figure is the Common Ground Alliance's own estimate, presented to Congress in February 2025; no independently audited national total exists. The 43,533,423 and 189,052 figures for 2024 are the U.S.-only columns from CGA's DIRT Report data tables, which report the U.S. and Canada separately. The NTSB's findings on the Lexington, Missouri explosion are preliminary and subject to change as the investigation continues.