Excavation accidents involving damaged cables, electrical lines, gas pipelines and water mains are a growing nationwide problem. According to the Office of Pipeline Safety, Hazardous Pipeline Operators alone experienced over 3,000 accidents in underground accidents from 1989 through 2001, amounting to property damages in excess of $768-million.

To improve the access to accurate asset information, such as the exact location of water mains, TelDig will embed Tadpole’s field mapping software into its utility software to provide utilities and contractor locators with a fully automated on-line locate ticket damage prevention process.

• TelDig’s customer base of One Call Centers, located across North America, will receive and forward locate requests to local utilities for field intervention.
• Utilities will be provided with detailed mapping of buried infrastructure in the field, thereby ensuring that field works and excavators have the most accurate information.

Components of the Solution
Tadpole’s Conic GIS technology will be embedded into TelDig Utility Suite, enabling the customer to integrate and deploy AM/FM or GIS data in the back-office software component where locate tickets are received, and in the field with TelDig Mobile. With this new solution, office operators of TelDig Utility Suite and field workers with TelDig Mobile will be able to view, send, edit, copy, paste and integrate AM/FM or GIS data into the entire locate process.

Commenting on the benefits of the joint solution, Jason Linley, director of Tadpole-Cartesia’s North American operators, said, "By blending the best-of-the breed technologies of TelDig Systems and Tadpole-Cartesia into one GIS-enriched product, utilities will have a unique solution to automate the locate process, improve the quality of data being sent into the field, and help them to minimize losses from excavation accidents."