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After fifteen seasons, what do you say to the people who carried you through the hardest one?

In this solo episode, Mike Sullivan, President of Utility Safety Partners, reflects on a digging year when calls to the contact centre rose more than 40 percent, and he thanks the agents, team leaders and managers who got through it.

He looks at what gives him confidence, including the Alternate Locate Provider option, the Look Up and Live overhead power line map, and the Damage Prevention Professional Certification, a program he is grateful his board backed.

He also shares that he will retire on April 30, 2027, and looks back on a career he calls a privilege.

Listen for:

:45 What happens when call volume jumps 40% and the locates never arrive?

5:15 Why are damages near zero when the locator isn't rushed?

9:00 Why do people hit overhead power lines they can plainly see?

12:45 What qualifies someone to manage damage prevention?

16:30 Could AI have predicted the season no one saw coming?

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This is a REPLAY of an episode first published in April 2026.

What if the people who keep gas lines, fibre, and power cables from being torn out of the ground have never had a profession to call their own?

Mike Sullivan talks with Coral Lukaniuk; engineer, longtime pipeline-integrity and public-awareness leader, and founder of coRoc Solutions, now Executive Director of the brand-new Damage Prevention Professional (DPP) Certification Program.

They unpack a strange truth: damage prevention is named in federal and provincial regulation, yet nearly everyone in it "fell into" the work, with no curriculum, credential, or career pathway behind them.

Coral explains why a nonprofit like Utility Safety Partners is the right home for the program, why it's emphatically not "just an Alberta thing," and why building a profession is a decades-long project worth starting now.

The conversation lands on a simple test of success: a day when DPP certification is a job requirement, and a damage-prevention pro is recognized as readily as an electrician at your door.

Listen for:

2:59 Why has no one ever built a career path for the people protecting what's buried beneath us?

7:25 Why does it matter that a nonprofit — not a company — is behind this certification?

13:58 Why would a board chase a goal that comes with no guarantee of success?

26:12 Why do so many people wrongly dismiss this as "just an Alberta thing"?

30:53 What does success actually look like for a profession that has never existed?

Connect with Guests:Coral Lukaniuk,Executive Director | coRoc Solutions

LinkedIn | Damage Prevention Professional Certification

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This is a REPLAY of an episode first published in August 2024.

Ready to revolutionize excavation safety?

Mike sits down with Ron Laidman and Iain Stables to explore Alberta's Alternate Locate Provider (ALP) program.

Launched after years of development, the ALP is set to change the game in damage prevention, offering unprecedented flexibility, increased capacity, and improved safety for all excavation projects.

Dig in as they discuss the ALP's impact, the challenges of implementation, and what the future holds for this innovative approach.

Listen For:
00:56 - The Birth of the Alternate Locate Provider (ALP) Program
05:13 - The Challenges of Consortium Contracts and the Need for Change
18:34 - The Rigorous Assessment Protocol for ALP Providers
25:28 - How Excavators Can Initiate the ALP Process

Guests:
Ron Laidman | Principal Advisor at Enertia Solutions
Email | LinkedIn

Iain Stables | Manager at ATCO Energy Systems
Email | Iain’s LinkedIn | Website | ATCO LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram

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Every year, roughly one in four utility strikes happens because someone never made the call… and after more than 50 years of fighting that number, Bill Kiger isn't slowing down.

Mike Sullivan sits down with Bill Kiger, President and CEO of Pennsylvania 811, a man who was handed a four-page law he'd never heard of at a 1974 meeting he was only supposed to attend to take notes… and who never really left.

What follows is a first-person account of how damage prevention was built from scratch.

Kiger covers all of it, handwritten tickets, a 45% routing failure rate, the birth of computerized ticketing, and the partnership that quietly launched Alberta One Call in 1984.

He's equally candid about what hasn't moved: no-locate damages have dropped from 50% to 25% over his career, and they've been stuck there.

What comes through above all is Kiger's unwavering conviction that no one advances alone, and that the border between Canada and the U.S. has never been the obstacle some imagined it to be.

Listen for:

2:07 How does a note-taker at a six-member Pittsburgh committee meeting end up spending 52 years building an entire industry?

11:27 When the most advanced One Call system in North America had a 45% failure rate... what did that look like, and why did it push Bill to invent something that didn't exist yet?

17:22 With 25% of all utility damages still caused by no locate request, has the industry hit a wall it can't break through?

26:19 How did a Pennsylvania One Call centre end up secretly operating Alberta's very first One Call system... and what nearly gave them away?

36:18 As FNCA grows and the Canada-U.S. damage prevention relationship deepens, where is this industry actually headed in the next decade?

Connect with Guests:Bill Kiger, President & CEO, Pennsylvania One Call System, Inc
LinkedIn | Website

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Every day, the underground infrastructure that powers modern life — gas, electricity, water, fibre — is struck by excavation equipment hundreds of thousands of times across North America, and for the first time ever, someone has written the book on why.

Scott Landes, a damage prevention leader with more than 40 years in the field, and Benjamin Dierker, Executive Director of the Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure (Aii), join host Mike Sullivan to discuss their newly released book,
Holding Back Disaster: Protecting Lives and Infrastructure Through Excavation Damage Prevention, published by Routledge on August 11, National 811 Day.

Built from interviews with roughly 45 industry insiders across the world, the book gives anyone from a new locator to a curious policymaker a human-centred account of a life-or-death industry most people have never heard of.

The conversation covers the messy, iterative process of writing a first-of-its-kind book, why damage numbers are at record highs even as the industry targets a 50-percent reduction, and what it will take in technology, culture, and new talent… to finally move the needle.

Listen for:

5:08 Why is this the first comprehensive book ever written about damage prevention?

19:13 What would the most experienced people in this industry say to their younger selves?

22:17 Why are damage costs at a record $83 billion even as the industry targets a 50% reduction?

23:39 Is technology already capable of eliminating the need for a notification centre?

27:22 What will it actually take to bring new people into damage prevention — and why does it matter?

Connect with Guests: Scott Landes, CEO, Excavation Safety Alliance, LLCMinneapolis
LinkedIn | Website

Connect with Guests: Benjamin Dierker, Executive Director and Author

LinkedIn | Website | Email | Book Link 1 | Book Link 2

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Every day, workers sit through safety orientations and walk away understanding far less than anyone in the room assumes…and nobody checks.

Mike Sullivan sits down with Dr. Estacio Pereira, Associate Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Calgary and founder of the ENSURE initiative, who turned his own experience of silently struggling through Canadian safety meetings into a research mission. Pereira introduces Bridge, a gamified mobile assessment platform that uses real photographs of a worker's actual job site to test hazard recognition in real time — giving trainers measurable data on exactly where their crew's knowledge breaks down, on the ground they're actually working on. The conversation cuts to the core of a systemic problem: passing a safety certification and actually understanding the hazard in front of you are not the same thing, and the industry has been confusing the two for decades.

Listen for:

9:45 How does a gamified safety tool actually know what workers don't know?

14:25 Why do workers stay silent in safety meetings even when they're completely lost?

18:00 What happens when your entire workforce has generic training but site-specific hazards?

32:57 What are SafeTalk and SimLift, and why do they matter beyond the classroom?

37:27 If a worker passes with 70%, how do you know the 30% they missed isn't the critical part?

Connect with Guests:Estacio Siemann Santos Pereira, P. Eng, Educator, and Researcher in Project Management

LinkedIn | Website | Email

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Three people were killed in Dallas on May 28, 2026. An 811 locate ticket had been filed. Some lines were marked. The gas line that mattered was not.

That's the gap this industry has to confront.

Mike Sullivan sits down with Brigham McCown, Naval aviator, federal pipeline regulator, pipeline CEO, and founder of the Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure (Aii), to trace the original eight-step vision behind 811, a vision that stalled at step three.

McCown argues the industry must move from a notification culture to a knowledge culture, and ultimately toward predictive safety, and that overly prescriptive legislation may be one of the things slowing that shift.

The conversation also covers the data security tensions around utility mapping, why online locate requests produce dramatically fewer damages than phone-based ones, and how Alberta's Alternate Locate Provider program achieved what a rigid legislative framework likely would have prevented.

Listen for:

5:21 Why did Naval Aviation pioneer the safety culture that every high-risk industry now tries to copy?

13:18 What was the original eight-step vision for 811 — and why did progress stall at step three?

17:01 Could the legislation meant to protect damage prevention actually be slowing it down?

31:45 Does calling 811 by phone produce more damages than submitting a locate request online?

34:12 What does it mean to move from a "call before you dig" culture to a "know before you dig" culture?

Connect with Guest:Brigham McCown, Chairman and CEO | Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure

LinkedIn | Website | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube

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Every step of the damage prevention process was followed…and a five-year-old boy still died.

Mike Sullivan sits down with Ron Peterson, Executive Director of the National Utility Locating Contractors Association (NULCA) and a 30-plus-year veteran of the locating industry, to discuss the position paper that sent shockwaves through the damage prevention world: "This System Is Designed to Fail."

Peterson explains why a one-call system built 50 years ago for a million locate requests can't survive 250 million notifications, ticket abuse with zero consequences, and utility maps that show lines on the wrong side of the road…or not at all.

What sets this conversation apart is Peterson's refusal to point fingers outward first: locating contractors, he argues, must own their failures in staffing, retention, and race-to-the-bottom contract bidding.

Mike and Ron also explore Alberta's Alternate Locate Provider program as living proof that unlocking locator capacity dramatically reduces damages, and float a bold "Uber for locators" concept that could reshape how excavators secure qualified help.

Listen for:

1:10 How does a stranger spray-painting your backyard turn into a 35-year career?

3:57 What happens when a system built for one million locate requests faces 250 million?

9:15 Why did a fatal gas explosion 500 feet from Ron's childhood home force this reckoning?

15:02 Why do trained locators keep walking out the door and is money really the reason?

32:28 Could ordering a qualified locator like an Uber actually fix the capacity crisis?

Connect with Guests:Ron Peterson, Executive Director at NULCA-The Voice of Professional Locators

LinkedIn | Website | NULCA

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