Workplace safety and the AI opportunity

Imagine this: it’s 7:35 am on a Saturday morning in October. You’re getting ready to take your family to the kids’ soccer match. The car is loaded, the snacks are packed, and you have everything you need for the five hours of fun that you’ve been looking for-ward to all week.

Then, as you’re locking the door to your house and heading for the car, your phone rings. The caller ID says it’s a 1-800 number and likely SPAM, but you know better: that phone number is from your company’s emergency contact centre. Before you even answer, you know that your weekend plans are done. The call is for a Code Red emergency; somewhere across your company’s operating footprint, a pipeline has been struck, and for the coming days or weeks, you’ll be on the team trying to clean up the catastrophe; a catastrophe that may have been mitigated by using AI.

Unfortunately, this scene is too common, and anyone who has worked in the pipeline industry for more than a few years has like-ly been involved in fixing the consequences of a line strike. When the stakes are so high, the pipeline industry needs to embrace the best, most effective tools for mitigating risk. And the good news is that there are many ways to implement AI in your organisation’s safety programme to decrease damages, keep your team safe, all while decreasing the cost of your One Call and safety programmes in the process.

Line strikes are as dangerous as ever

The pipeline safety industry is certainly on an impressive trajectory and in many ways continues to become safer every year. This on-going commitment to safety is fuelled by cutting-edge technologies such as electronic positive response (EPR) systems, robust regulatory enhancements, and comprehensive education initiatives, ensuring our pipelines are safer than ever before. However, despite these efforts, pipeline strikes remain a critical concern, costing the US an estimated US$30 billion annually. The 2022 DIRT Report indicates that the number of damages per million dollars of construction spending increased by 12.35% from 2021 to 2022, highlighting the persistent nature of these incidents. Major root causes, such as failure to notify the one call centre/811 and improper excavation practices, continue to drive these damages, underscoring the need for ongoing vigilance and improvement in damage prevention strategies.

AI can help

One Call tickets will always need human involvement, but AI thrives in scenarios where data and context matter. For example, a typical company’s ticketing process might involve multiple employees evaluating factors like the type of dig to be done, what as-sets are in the excavation area, the track record of the excavator conducting the work, and the potential impact should a line strike occur.

While decisions like whether a proposed excavation is close to company assets are easy enough for a human to determine, AI can consider the excavator’s history, the type of dig and past incidents from such excavation, and potential consequences if something goes wrong in just a few seconds, all while making these determinations with datasets consisting of decades of data and tens of mil-lions of data points.

Better yet, AI can provide a recommendation regarding how to proceed with line marking, whether to have a company employee present for the dig, its confidence in its recommendations, and can provide references to company documentation and data to support such its contention, in less time than it takes a person to read the original One Call ticket.

In fact, based on my company’s research, AI and humans working together can cut nearly four-fifths of the time necessary to evaluate One Call tickets. This time saving supports decreasing costs and decreasing margin for error. But more importantly, the time savings allow for pipeline operators to respond to tickets faster, removing one more unnecessary excuse for One Call violators: “I didn’t call because I thought you would take too long to get back to me.”

Greater opportunities ahead

Line strikes are just one important hazard that AI can help mitigate, but equally important is protecting pipeline workers in the field. Near misses, good catches, incident reports, job safety analyses, and even work orders for upcoming projects provide insight into where the next accident...

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Read the article online at: https://www.worldpipelines.com/special-reports/16082024/workplace-safety-and-the-ai-opportunity/