In case of emergency, dial ___.
Most Americans would fill in the blank with 911. Knowledge of the national network of emergency hotlines is almost universal in the United States, where it was first introduced in the late 1960s.
More than 70 percent of Americans have called that number at least once in their lives, and many people have called it multiple times, according to a survey by the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch.
Testimonies have boosted 911’s cultural cachet, with some callers attesting that it made the difference between life and death.
The branding and the simple dial-and-dispatch framework were so effective in America that it caught on in other countries. A 911 call to signal the authorities works in Canada and Mexico.
Calling 911 also triggers an emergency response in many other Latin American and Caribbean nations, along with Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Jordan and Liberia, according to Emergency Directory, a website that lists the different countries’ emergency hotlines.
Not as Well Known as 911
Before you dig, dial ___.
The answer to fill in that blank is 811. American authorities want people to call that number before they break ground, to keep some things that could be beneath that ground from being broken.
The aim of the 811 hotline is twofold: to save money and to prevent injury and death, by avoiding destroying the many pieces of infrastructure that are buried.
Buried infrastructure includes electrical, cable and other cords as well as buried natural gas, sewer and other lines.
Knowledge of 811 is not as widespread as the fame of its close cousin 911. One survey found that only 50 percent of Americans had heard of it by 2020, up from 47 percent in 2010.
Wider public awareness of 811 might not matter a great deal if the right people are informed—those who do most of the digging.
Knowledge of 811 among excavation professionals is about as widespread as the public awareness of 911. An Associated General Contractors survey found that 99 percent of excavators know of its existence along with the legal requirements to call before they dig, which vary by state.
Yet excavation professionals are not the only people who dig deeply into the ground. America has a substantial do-it-yourself, or DIY, culture. Many homeowners do work on their own land for recreation, to save money, or both.
If DIYers push a post, shovel, pick or rented backhoe into the wrong place with enough force, the results can be expensive, or worse.
National 811 Day
Common Ground Alliance, an industry-backed buried infrastructure public safety group, has designated next Tuesday as National 811 Day to raise awareness about this national call-in number and excavation safety service. This is because Tuesday is Aug. 11, or 8/11.
Other organizations and government bodies are working on educational activities next week, including the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which is part of the Department of Transportation.
“Research has revealed that if someone calls 8-1-1 before they dig, they have a 99 percent chance of avoiding an incident, injury, harm to the environment and even death,” the pipeline agency states on its website.
Disaster Book Incoming
Aug. 11 is also the day when the book “Holding Back Disaster: Protecting Lives and Infrastructure Through Excavation Damage Prevention” is set to be released by publisher Routledge.
The foreword is by Mary E. Peters, a former transportation secretary during George W. Bush’s second administration who launched the 811 number and program in 2007.
In a preview that they shared with The Epoch Times, co-authors Scott Landes and Benjamin J. Dierker dedicate their book to “the most vital profession you never knew existed.”
That relatively unknown profession is alternately called “excavation safety” or “damage prevention.”
Those who work in excavation safety include everyone from the 811 phone operators to the utility locators. Utility locators put up flags and paint lines above ground to parallel the buried ones, so that excavators know where not to dig.
How Badly Could It Go?
“Holding Back Disaster” begins with a horrifying story of a backhoe operator who struck a natural gas pipeline in a residential neighborhood and alerted the authorities immediately. Responders did what they could to shut it off, but they missed something vital.
The accident led to a natural gas accumulation in one home. A woman trying to boil tea accidentally ignited the gas pocket, which leveled the whole structure.
“Nothing could prepare Mr. Johnson for the call he would receive at 10:33 a.m. telling him that there had been an accident at his home, where his wife and child were,” Landes and Dierker write.
Fortunately, that call never came.
“The waking nightmare Mr. Johnson seemed destined to enter, mercifully, never came to pass,” the authors explain.
What readers encounter in that story “was not a record of events, but a glimpse of what might have been” if “days earlier” a utility locator had not come by the worksite and “marked the buried lines, quietly preventing this and countless other tragedies.”
Co-author Dierker called that part of the book “ultimately a story of the bomb that doesn’t go off.”
“I wanted to open the book with the stakes and bring the reader right into the issue at hand,” he told The Epoch Times. “It’s one thing to describe the risks, but it’s another thing to be immediately immersed in it and personally confront the potential consequences.”
Is Damage at an All-Time High?
One impetus for writing the book is that underground infrastructure damage incidents appear to be on the rise. Last year likely saw the most individual cases of damage ever, according to the Common Ground Alliance. A preliminary report from CGA’s Damage Information Reporting Tool registered a “record high” in the incidence of damage in 2025, the group announced in July.
The hedging is due to how the numbers are handled. Raw numbers come from voluntary reporting that is then statistically modeled by CGA. From this we get not a specific number of incidents but rather a range of between 600,000 and 1.2 million incidents every year, Dierker said.
“Those are times a shovel, backhoe, jackhammer, or other tool made contact with a pipe, cable, or wire somewhere in the U.S. each year,” he explained.
In their defense, earth movers have a lot of buried infrastructure to accidentally impact. The United States has 3.3 million miles of pipeline according to the nation’s chief pipeline agency, and most of that is buried underground.
Landes and Dierker put forward a very rough estimate of “50 million miles of buried pipes, cables, and wires” including public and private buried lines.
It’s a great mass of lines to work around, which can be difficult. However, the consequences of damaging that infrastructure can run from small annoyances to far worse outcomes.
Landes said that the real value of infrastructure is not in the materials or even what is being transported, but the fact that it actually works. This gives residents the “uninterrupted services we all enjoy when we flip a switch, flush a toilet, or start a gas stove.”
Every incident “threatens to have rippling impacts” that dwarf the cost of repairing the “direct damage,” he told The Epoch Times.
Leaving aside any deaths, buried infrastructure breakage can put people out of electricity, heating, or cooking capabilities, cut off their internet, gum up traffic, make disposing of waste much harder, and force evacuations.
Are Carveouts Part of the Problem?
State departments of transportation are exempt from 811 advance notice requirements. Dierker added that “other exemptions can exist based on the size of a utility or other entities like municipalities, local public works, etc.,” and he believes these exemptions are part of the problem.
DOT exemptions are “definitely creating blind spots in communication and creating higher potential for preventable damage,” he said. An additional wrinkle is that it may be contractors for the state DOTs and not the DOTs themselves.
The Pennsylvania DOT, or PennDot, announced that a state contractor “working on the Route 61 Frackville to St. Clair reconstruction project struck a gas line,” on Oct. 23, 2024.
Normal traffic on Route 61 was “detoured on Interstate 81, Route 901 and Route 209.” PennDOT told motorists to expect delays and use caution.
Dierker held up Route 61’s closure as one example of damage caused by a state DOT contractor, though he did not want to attribute that damage to “an exemption definitively.”
The Epoch Times asked PennDot if that gas line had been marked prior to the accident by a utility locator. A spokesman said it had been marked, but not well.
“The PA1 call was submitted and marked out prior to any excavation work done,” replied Sean Brown, a PennDOT safety press officer on Thursday. “However, the gas line was incorrectly marked out and struck by an excavator.”