Three dead in Dallas apartment explosion on May 28, 2026. The investigation is ongoing but preliminary reports say a construction crew hit a nearby gas line while excavating. It wasn't an isolated incident. In Texas, there were over 4,800 pipeline strikes due to excavation in 2026 alone, and nearly one-third of the excavators had not called 811 prior to digging.
This is as much a GIS story as it is a construction safety story. Why This Matters: One of the biggest, most consequential applications of geospatial data is in the industry that tracks everything buried under our streets — the water, gas, electric, and telecom infrastructure — yet much remains on paper.
The Scale of the Problem
The numbers are severe. Somewhere between 400,000 to 800,000 underground utility strikes take place annually in the U.S. More than 400 people have lost their lives and over 2,000 have been injured directly as a result since the year 2000. The Common Ground Alliance estimates that the annual cost is about $30 billion in the United States.
More telling, though, is that 76 percent of reported utility strikes are related to missing or incorrect utility data. Not equipment failure. Not reckless digging. A data problem — the same kind of problem GIS exists to solve, in an industry that is not fully into it yet.
Isn't This What 811 / "Call Before You Dig" Is Here to Help Avoid?
The One Call approach does a real job, but there is at least one structural limitation worth understanding. When an excavator calls 811, a locator arrives to mark utilities on the ground for that job — spray paint, flags, or physical markers that fade or get disturbed within days. That locate is designed for one excavation. It is not intended such that it can become a long-term, reusable source of record.
In traditional One Call records vs purpose-built subsurface utility engineering investigations, thorough academic case study analysis has shown that the fundamental data remains dubious even after a proper locate-and-mark cycle — unregistered utilities, coordinates published without sufficient accuracy estimations, and stubbornly non-participating utility owners all contribute to unavoidable gaps. Each time someone digs there, they must rediscover the same ground from the bottom up — imperfectly.
It's All About Data: The Real Gap Here Is Data Quality, Not Effort
American Society of Civil Engineers standard ASCE 38 defines four classes of utility data, from D (record or oral history-based) up to A (physical exposure and survey of utilities). The vast majority of the utility data excavators actually use lies at the low end of that spectrum. One industry characterization of the current state is stark: "Utility information often can be found in temporary spray-painted mark-outs, old as-builts scattered across various filing cabinets, or written in the memories of aging employees." That is not a failure of technology — GPS (Global Positioning System) and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) have been available for decades. It's more of a failure in adoption and workflow.
What Would an Actual Fix Look Like?
Industry groups have coalesced around a particular framing for the fix: improve the locating-and-marking task itself to be a mapping task instead of an isolated, disconnected finding and mapping activity. Chicago doesn't deal in pure theory but rather offers an example we can take to the bank. Everyone involved in subsurface utility and excavation work was required to go through the city's Office of Underground Coordination and submit their plans into a specialized system called dotMaps. Chicago is held up as a model city by the Common Ground Alliance as part of its "50 in 5" goal of halving national utility strikes within five years.
The technical change underneath a fix like this is simple to describe (even if it takes real coordination to execute): rather than a locate producing a temporary paint mark, it produces a permanent GIS record with location information. Ground-penetrating radar can detect both metal and plastic utilities in a single pass, and when paired with RTK positioning, obtains location data accurate to centimeters — precise enough to actually rely on the next time someone is looking for an underground utility at the same location, rather than starting from scratch by locating from an incomplete paper record.
Where This Connects to the Wider Reach of GIS and Survey Work
This is the same fundamental principle behind any GIS output you would actually want to trust — data must be persistent, verifiable, and centrally documented, not a one-time product that disappears once the immediate job is over. The same surveying discipline applies just as much to underground work: the validity of a locate is only as good as the record it leaves behind for whoever comes looking next.
Where This Leaves You
The tools required to solve this problem aren't newer or more sophisticated systems — GPR, RTK positioning, and GIS platforms already exist in mature forms. Across much of the country, it's not more technology that is missing. What's missing is the adoption of Chicago's program and workflow discipline: treating every locate as an input into a permanent record, rather than as something that gets marked once and forgotten about. The same ground keeps getting rediscovered imperfectly, again and again, with real lives and billions of dollars riding on it being done right — until more municipalities and utility owners make that shift.
