Damage Prevention Vehicles

5 days per week, 8-10 hours per day, from January to December of each year, OTM deploys a staff of highly trained inspectors to tens of thousands of excavation work sites.  They inspect sites to ensure compliance with NYS Code Rule 753 regarding the protection of underground facilities.  Through an automated or manual ticket management system, we review all NYS stakeout ticket requests, select high risk tickets per criteria defined by you (e.g., utilities within 4 ft. of the excavation), visit sites where excavating is being conducted to inspect and ensure Code Rule compliance is being followed, and provide you with weekly & YTD reports including recommendations from our findings.  In addition, OTM will immediately notify you (while on site) if your utility is in danger of being damaged.  If your utility is hit/damaged, we will immediately dispatch an inspector to the site to take pictures, assess and document the incident that will subsequently be reported to you.

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This program design was established by Avangrid (formerly known as Iberdola, parent company of both RG&E and NYSEG) in 2008 and is still being utilized today.  This program has been very successful in reducing their gas utility damages and PSC required damage ratio.  You can employ this same damage preventive program for your company and significantly reduce your underground asset damages, customer interruptions, and the associated costs of remediation.   As the well-known idiom goes ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’.  Restated for the utility asset management business, ‘a well-executed damage prevention program is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars   in damage costs.