Underground Utilities Mapping

Why?

• There is no comprehensive or accurate understanding of the infrastructure that is buried in Minnesota or anywhere else in the nation,
• Technology for locating buried infrastructure ("Call Before You Dig") has gone largely unchanged for nearly 50 years,
• Every year, more and more infrastructure is being placed underground,
• Every year, the need to locate this buried infrastructure prior to construction is increasing - it is not uncommon for locate requests in Minnesota to exceed 7,000 in a day,
• In 2021, Minnesota had over 2,200 unintentional hits on underground infrastructure - many of these were on gas lines,
• Without working toward a viable solution for having the mapped location of Minnesota's underground infrastructure, there will be no opportunity in the future to leverage substantial safety and cost saving technologies such as GPS enabled locating equipment and Augmented Reality, and
• Both Congress and the Common Ground Alliance have identified the introduction of state-of-the-art geospatial technologies into the buried infrastructure community as a top safety priority.