Encouraging Innovation in Locating and Characterizing Underground Utilities

T Common Ground Alliance estimates that there are 35 million miles of underground utilities in the United States. That’s about the same as the distance between Earth and Mars. Every day, utilities made of less-detectable materials are installed deeper underground. Much of the existing data on utility location, composition, ownership, and status (that is, whether active or abandoned) is missing, incorrect, or incomplete. Current technologies and tools can only find 80–90% of existing utilities. Finding the other 10–20% and successfully managing utility conflicts require new tools. When a highway construction project is surprised by a utility, the results can include redesign costs, delay costs, change orders, claims, and damages (including repairs, environmental releases, and even human casualties). To reduce these negative impacts, several SHRP 2 projects are developing new tools to help locate and characterize underground utilities, as well as new tools to identify utility conflicts and solutions. This document provides an overview of the SHRP 2 projects related to underground utilities. It includes a brief description and the status of each project. SHRP 2 hosted webinars on these projects in February 2012 and August 2011. Recordings of these webinars and PDFs of the slides are available on the webinar section of the SHRP 2 website: www.TRB.org/SHRP2/ webinars.