Grant Piraine
Mar 3, 2025
In March 2025, Own Your Safety expanded its training offering with the launch of Know Before You Dig – Private & Public Utility Infrastructure Awareness (North America).
The decision to develop a North America edition followed years of working across multiple jurisdictions and observing the same issues surface repeatedly. While regulatory frameworks, notification systems, and enforcement models differ between provinces and states, the underlying risks associated with buried infrastructure remain largely the same.
Across both Canada and the United States, private property continues to represent the least understood and most inconsistently managed area of ground disturbance risk. Records are often incomplete, ownership is unclear, and locate responsibilities vary widely. These conditions are not unique to any single jurisdiction and cannot be addressed through region-specific rules alone.
The North America course was designed to be jurisdiction-agnostic. Rather than focusing on local legislation or notification processes, it emphasizes principles that apply regardless of location. These include understanding how locate information is generated, recognizing its limitations, identifying uncertainty in the field, and knowing when work should pause until risk is better managed.
This approach reflects a deliberate shift away from compliance-based training toward education that supports informed decision-making. Workers and supervisors are often required to make judgments in real time, particularly on private property where formal systems may not apply. The course is structured to support those decisions by reinforcing situational awareness and accountability.
The launch of the North America edition represents an extension of the program’s original intent. It acknowledges that while rules change by jurisdiction, the need to understand what exists below ground, and what may not be fully documented, is universal.