Safe digging practices are being brought up once again by Fortis BC with April being declared Dig Safe Month in the province.
The initiative serves as a reminder for Prince George home-owners and contractors to call or click” BC One Call before they dig.
Unfortunately, the area has seen no shortage of incidents over the past few years.
“In Prince George from 2012 until about now, it is about 181 damages that have taken place in the area, there is a few more that have happened in other parts of the north but the majority of the damage has happened in Prince George,” says Ian Turnbull, Manager of Damage and Prevention Services.
He adds most people are often caught off on guard on how close the infrastructure was to the ground.
“In the last little while, people came across gas lines that they weren’t expecting to find and the majority hadn’t made their one call, one of the comments we get particularly in the north is that they didn’t expect our pipe to be within the first metre of the earth.”
“The best place to start is by making that call to Fortis BC, not only will you get information from us but our underground plant, your going to get all of the other members in the area with their information as well, so it’s not just us you have to worry about its also water and sewer.”
Turnbull is expecting the digging in Prince George to break loose over the next two weeks with the weather expected to warm up.
He says that can lead to people not going through the proper channels when they begin there to dig.
Some of these mistakes by the public can be really costly and could have trickled down effect on roads and services.
“For our product, if you break our line all of a sudden you have natural gas blowing around in a potentially dangerous situation as it could be close to buildings, at the minimum, it could be at a street and will have to be closed, which will inconvenience all of the commuters. If you hit a power line that can be deadly if you are a machine or person because if it makes contact there is good chance it could get electrocuted and if you hit a fiber-optics cable, those are extremely expensive to repair and in some cases, the telecom companies will charge you for their the loss of bandwidth.”
To learn more about BC One Call, click here.