30 Years Strong | Leadership Series 6 of 12: Safe Digging
By Tony Kerwin, P.Eng., Chief Operating Officer
Reliable infrastructure delivery is not only an operational, financial, or cultural achievement. It is a safety achievement. Everything OE Utility Services has built over 30 years rests on that foundation.
OE leaders in this series have each explored a different dimension of OE success: legacy, operations, sales, finance, and culture. Each matters. But the dimension that underwrites all of them is safety.
When I wrote earlier this year about reliability at scale, I made the case that safety and operations are not separate systems. They are one system. This is the other half of that argument, and it starts with a word our industry uses every day.
Hydro excavation is widely described as the safe way to dig. It is more precise and less destructive than conventional mechanical excavation around buried infrastructure. That is why OE has built so much of its work around it and why our Customers trust it on their sites.
But after three decades in this business, we have come to believe that the most dangerous word in safe digging may be the word “safe.”
Safer than the alternative is not the same as free from risk. The space between those two ideas is where people can get hurt, and closing that gap is a leadership responsibility.
When a Strong Reputation Becomes a Risk
Every hydrovac unit OE operates carries a quiet contradiction. The same technology that reduces the likelihood of an excavator bucket striking a gas line can create the impression that the danger has been engineered away.
It has not.
The pressure and suction that make a hydrovac effective can also make it hazardous when respect for the equipment slips.
High-pressure water can penetrate the skin and cause a serious injection injury. What may appear minor at first can threaten a hand, a limb, or a livelihood.
The vacuum system carries enough force to cause severe injury if a hand, limb, clothing, or equipment comes too close to the intake.
Buried electrical infrastructure presents another potentially fatal hazard. Water and equipment can conduct electricity, and a crew may receive little or no warning before contact occurs.
None of this is a reason to dig any other way. It is a reason to lead the work, not simply schedule it.
Complacency Is the Hazard a Checklist Cannot Catch
Some of the most serious incidents in our industry do not involve people who were never trained or did not know the rules. They involve experienced people on a routine day, at a site that looks like the last hundred sites, doing work they have completed safely many times before.
That is what makes complacency so difficult to manage.
It does not appear on equipment inspection. It develops gradually, often on good days, because nothing has gone wrong. The safer a method’s safety reputation becomes, the easier it can be to underestimate the hazards that remain.
We cannot inspect our way out of complacency. We have to lead our way out of it.
At OE, that means treating the routine job with the same seriousness as the difficult one. The pre-task briefing on an ordinary site is not a formality to move through. It is the moment when the crew consciously reconnects with the hazards that familiarity may have pushed into the background.
When a supervisor treats that conversation as essential, the crew does too. When a supervisor rushes it, that message is heard just as clearly.
A Safer Method Does Not Lower The Standard
Ontario’s excavation requirements are clear for good reason.
Before excavation begins, underground services in and near the work area must be located and marked. Required locates must be complete, valid, visible, and available to the people performing the work. Ontario locates are valid for at least 60 days, although the infrastructure owner establishes the precise validity period and any conditions shown on the locate documentation.
An expired locate is not a valid locate. Markings that are no longer visible cannot simply be assumed. The locate documentation must be reviewed and applied in the field, not merely obtained and filed away.
The appropriate excavation method must reflect the locate information, the infrastructure owner’s instructions, applicable safety codes, site conditions, and the hazards involved. Around gas pipelines and other critical infrastructure, specific tolerance-zone and hand-excavation requirements may apply. At OE, our operating procedures add another essential discipline: buried infrastructure is treated as live unless it has been confirmed otherwise.
These requirements are not administrative obstacles. They protect workers, the public, our Customers, and the infrastructure communities rely on.
The scale of the risk is significant. In its fiscal 2025 Public Safety Report, the Technical Standards and Safety Authority recorded 1,924 pipeline strikes in Ontario. Pipeline strikes represented more than 60% of all reported fuels incidents that year. TSSA also reported that most pipeline strikes were associated with excavation taking place without the proper locate permissions.
Enforcement is active. Recent Ontario cases have involved substantial fines where contractors failed to follow excavation requirements, failed to hand-dig where required, or obtained locates and then failed to use them properly.
Those are not simply equipment failures. They are failures of planning, supervision, judgment, and execution.
That is where leadership lives.
For the utility owners, municipalities, and contractors who are our Customers, a strike is never only our problem. It affects their schedule, their liability, their reputation, and potentially an entire community’s access to essential services.
Treating a safe method with full discipline is how we protect them as well as ourselves.
OE has operated to that standard for 30 years, not because an inspector may be watching, but because our Customers, our communities, and our people are counting on us.
A good tool does not deserve less scrutiny. It earns more, because more is being trusted to it.
Leading Safety When No One Is Watching
A province-wide operation means leadership cannot be on every site, every day.
The real test of a safety culture is not what happens when a manager is standing nearby. It is what the crew does on a remote site, late in the day, when the job is nearly complete, and no one would immediately know if a corner had been cut.
That standard can’t be supervised into existence. It has to be built deliberately over time.
It is built by training crews not only in what the procedure requires, but why it exists, so the standard travels with them when leadership is not present.
It is built through stop-work authority that every employee knows is real, supported the first time it is used and every time after.
It is built by treating near-misses as information rather than embarrassment, then using what we learn to improve the next job.
And it is built by field leaders who model the standard on ordinary days, because ordinary days are when standards are most likely to slip.
When the standard holds on a site no one is checking, that is not luck. That is culture.
Culture is built by leadership long before it is tested in the field.
Why This Is a Leadership Article
It would be easy to treat safe digging as an operational issue or something for the safety team to own.
That would be a mistake.
The decision to treat a safe method with full seriousness begins at the top. It is reflected in how work is planned, how crews are trained and resourced, how performance is measured, and how leaders respond when someone raises a concern.
A crew’s vigilance is shaped by whether leadership has made vigilance the expectation or has quietly signaled that schedule and production matter more.
Zero-harm does not begin with the person holding the wand. It starts with leaders who define What Right Looks Like, reinforce it consistently, and refuse to let a strong safety record become a reason to relax.
Looking Ahead
As OE marks 30 years, the priorities that brought us here are the same ones that will carry us forward:
- Treating our safest methods with the most discipline, never the least
- Building crews who carry the standard when no one is watching
- Keeping valid locates, tolerance-zone requirements, and live-line assumptions non-negotiable
- Using near-misses to improve the work, not assign blame
- Ensuring leaders own safety as a core operating responsibility
In Closing
Hydro excavation is the safest and most precise method available for much of the work we perform around buried infrastructure.. We believe that, and OE has built 30 years of reliable delivery around it.
But the moment a crew or a company begins to believe that “safe” means “safe enough to relax,” the reputation of the method becomes a hazard on its own.
Preventing that is what leadership is for.
It is not a slogan on a wall, not a binder on a shelf. It is a daily and deliberate refusal to allow our best tools, our experience, or our past success to make us complacent.
That is how we protect our Customers and the communities we serve.
Most importantly, it is how the people who perform this work go home the same way they arrived.
After 30 years, that remains the measure of leadership that matters most.
Tony Kerwin, P.Eng.
Chief Operating Officer | OE Utility Services | www.oeservices.ca
What keeps your crews from getting comfortable with a job that has gotten easier?
Please contact us to discuss and find out how OE Utility Services can help you!
If you haven’t already, we encourage you to read our incredible leadership team’s prior articles in our 30 Years Strong Leadership Series:
1 of 12 — Honouring Our 30-Year Legacy and Shaping What’s Next — Keith Boulton, CEO
2 of 12 — Reliability at Scale: Leading Operational Excellence — Tony Kerwin, COO
3 of 12 — Growth Through Trust: The Discipline Behind Sustainable Sales — George Chung, CSO
4 of 12 — Built to Last: The Financial Discipline Behind 30 Years of Reliable Growth — David Branigan, CFO
5 of 12 — People First: Building Culture in Utility Services — Nicole Chapman, CHRO
