For years – decades even – the damage prevention industry has paid lip service to a goal of zero incidents. Many individuals and companies pursue it earnestly and truly strive for zero. But, too often, it is a slogan at best and a cynical joke at worst.
It is worth exploring what “zero” means in the context of hundreds of thousands of annual incidents and tens of billions of dollars in losses. Pushing back on rising trends and new historic peaks is not new. The Infrastructure Protection Coalition’s 811 Emergency report made ripples a few years ago. The Common Ground Alliance’s “50 percent reduction in five years” goal is still ongoing and, today, feels tenuous. Georgia 811 and Virginia 811 broke new ground with excavation readiness research and modeling. Yet despite these efforts, we still see damage. Not only do we see damage – we seem to see more and more of it.
The scale of the problem can seem insurmountable. If “50 in 5” feels out of reach right now, how could we ever reach zero nationally? The flaw is treating a national statistic as proof of inevitability on an individual job. That is like pointing to annual traffic fatalities as evidence that seat belts “don’t work” – and then skipping your own seat belt. Aggregate outcomes describe the scale of the challenge; they don’t remove agency at the point of work.
That mindset quietly turns probability into permission. It replaces personal agency with resignation: because the number is big, my role is small. But excavation damage is not traffic. It is behavior interacting with process – ticket quality, pre-job planning, locating practices, potholing, tolerance zone discipline, communication, and verification. “Zero” does not begin as a national metric; it begins as a standard for the next crew, the next locate, the next dig. The industry will never reach zero by staring at national totals and calling them proof of inevitability. It only gets there when leaders insist – relentlessly and consistently – that zero is the expectation within their scope of control, every time.
The hard part is that “zero” is easy to say and difficult to operationalize. Most organizations already have safety policies and training requirements. Some even have mature quality programs. Yet the same pattern keeps surfacing in incident after incident: the work did not fail because no one cared. It failed because the system allowed uncertainty to survive all the way to the moment of excavation. That is the true enemy of zero – unresolved uncertainty.
A ticket can be technically valid but practically unusable. A locate can be technically completed but not trusted. A mark can be placed but not verified. A handoff can occur but not be understood. A contractor assumes the marks are right because “that’s what we do.” A facility operator assumes the excavator will pothole because “that’s what they do.” Both sides are working hard, and both sides are relying on assumptions. Assumptions are not controls. And the difference between zero and “some damage” often comes down to whether uncertainty is closed out or carried forward.
This is where “zero” stops being a slogan and becomes a posture. It is not an emotional commitment; it is a procedural one. The question is not whether people intend to do the right thing. The question is whether the job is structured so the right thing happens even under pressure.
In practice, a zero mindset is simply the refusal to proceed under ambiguity. When the work area is unclear, the locate is questionable, the markings conflict with what is visible, the jobsite has changed, or the excavation plan does not match reality, the correct response is not optimism. It is resolution. Zero is not built by hoping the marks are accurate; it is built by verifying they are.
This is why the industry does not just have a “damage” problem – it has a reliability problem. Participation is no longer the bottleneck. The clear majority of damages occur in a world where the call was made and the ticket exists. The system ran. But too often, it ran with weak links – inconsistent ticket quality, inconsistent locate quality, inconsistent communication, inconsistent verification. If any part of the chain is unreliable, the outcome remains unpredictable. And unpredictability is the opposite of zero.
Nevertheless, a significant proportion of damages occur because of skirting the system. These cannot be ignored, but they also cannot paralyze progress or lead to overinvestment and inefficient use of resources like more marketing with minimal marginal return. In fact, lest anyone treat no calls as a roadblock to zero, technology today is capable of advanced warning through real-time fiber optic sensing and other practices. But to unlock it, it takes investment and collaboration.
By and large, despite no calls, awareness is not the issue. Even within the industry, it is not lack of awareness of best practice, but lack of safety culture and a general attitude that they are guidance rather than conditions of every job.
The practical implication is this: zero is not achieved by asking people to care more. Most people already care. Zero is achieved when the work is designed so that uncertainty cannot quietly pass through the process and show up at the bucket. A zero-incident culture is simply a culture that treats ambiguity as unacceptable – not because anyone is trying to be difficult, but because ambiguity is where damage hides. If the information is incomplete, the locate is questionable, the markings conflict with the site conditions, or the plan has changed, the expectation is not to “make it work.” The expectation is to resolve it. That is what separates a system that hopes for good outcomes from a system that produces them.
Zero will not be achieved nationally by staring at national totals. It will be built locally, then multiplied. No organization controls the entire chain. But every organization controls something – how it prioritizes, trains, audits, documents, communicates, escalates, and verifies. When one link in the chain becomes consistently reliable, it raises expectations and forces the rest of the system to adapt. Reliability spreads when the industry stops normalizing ambiguity.
And this is the real point: accepting that zero is possible is not promising perfection. It is rejecting the idea that damage is inevitable. The industry has lived with high incident volume for so long that “some damage is expected” has become the background assumption. That assumption may feel realistic, but it is corrosive. It turns preventable failures into an accepted cost of doing business.
Zero is not a number we reach by declaring it. It is a standard we enforce by design. It is created job by job, crew by crew, locate by locate – when leaders decide that uncertainty does not get a free pass simply because the schedule is tight and the industry is busy. The next damage is not inevitable. The next damage is a decision point. And the industry will start moving toward zero in a serious way when the decision becomes consistent: we do not proceed until we know.
Benjamin Dierker is the Executive Director of the Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure (Aii), the nation’s only public policy think tank dedicated to infrastructure.