User Manual

About the Tool

In the U.S. it is estimated that an underground utility is hit about every minute, and there were 317,869 known strikes with damage in 2016 (CGA-DIRT 2016). In the state of New Jersey, millions of excavations are carried out each year to install or repair buried pipes and cables or to construct new facilities, and some of those excavations has led to damages to buried utilities. These damages risked lives and interrupted service, inflicting substantial but unknown cost to the utility industry and the society at large. While the direct cost of these damages is often borne by the utility or construction companies, the social costs of these damages are often tremendous but are difficult to estimate, leading to the challenges to establish clear accountabilities for the true cost of utility strikes. This issue is particularly pronouncing in the state of New Jersey as New Jersey has some of the most densely populated areas and the most intricate infrastructure systems in the Nation. Needed is a robust tool that can be used to estimate the true cost of utility strikes. Such a tool would allow the NJBPU and the utility industry to identify the ways in which these costs can be minimized as well as gaps in knowledge requiring further research. The tool would also assist the NJ Board of Public Utility to implement enforcement measures on excavation damage prevention. The tool that can be used to determine the impact on the community and total cost of excavation damages. In the project, excavation damage cases were analysed to determine the impact on the community (interruption of utility services, property damage, traffic impact, disruption of residents and businesses, etc.) and the total costs for repairs, restoration of services, use of police, fire, and other local responders, associated underground utility response costs, financial impact on businesses, etc.

About the Document

This document is a web user manual on the Utility Strike True Cost Estimator Tool. It illustrates all the steps to use the web tool through its web browser interface. The manual is divided into different chapters, starting off with a system overview by providing a brief description on each component of the tool, steps on how to load the previous utility incident cases, steps on how to use the manual with the help of screenshots and finally, what results to expect by using the manual.

GENERAL OVERVIEW OF THE USER INTERFACE

Figure 1: Utility Strikes Cost Indicators

Direct Cost, Indirect Cost and Social Cost

Direct Cost

As per definition, direct costs are the costs that are directly linked to the physical construction of the project and relate to conception, development and implementation costs which are usually calculated prior to the repair works. After extensive research, the below mentioned are the indicators of Direct Cost:

Administrative Cost: Mainly back office support cost; time and it’s value spent by staff in dealing with the incident.
Planning and Design: All the cost associated with site survey, risk assessment, consultation with interested parties, engineering and cost assessment of proposed technique, designing, issuing of notices and works, attaining permits, and so on.
Diversion of Utility Existing Services: Cost associated with diverting existing and nearby utilities.
Supervision of the Construction Works: Cost associated with restoration/restart of the utility.
Traffic Management: Sometimes road closure is required during repair works, therefore, in such cases, there will be cost associated with renting lanes and traffic control devices.
Material and Construction Works: Labour and equipment cost, pipe material cost, pipe bedding material cost, reinstatement of trench, etc.
Emergency Cost Responders: All the expenditures spent towards Emergency services such as Fire Department, Emergency Medical Services, Police Department, Arson Unit, Prosecutor’s Office, Red Cross, etc.

Indirect Cost

Indirect costs are those that are not directly linked or applied to construction cost categories. They are usually proportional to duration and are calculated as a percentage of project direct cost. These are costs that are paid by contractor or owner to parties that are not directly linked to the construction. They usually consist of the following:

Increased Insurance Premiums and Excesses: Depends on how a contractor procures insurance. For policies relating specifically to utility strike cover, the increase in premiums could be calculated. However, this will be difficult to attribute to specific incidents. Increases in more general liability policies may be difficult to relate unless the insurer specifies the portion of the increase caused by service strikes.
Program Overrun(s): Extra time added to the initial project, value of extra resources, plausible permit requirements, etc.
Compensation and Tax Rebates: Compensation payment made on injured parties and expenditures spent on training and replacing them. Also, the tax revenues lost due to injuries and deaths.
Loss of Parking Revenue: When metered parking spaces are lost, there are chances for loss of revenue in parking fee and parking fine.
Costs to Highway Authority: When a utility beneath roadway has been damaged, chances are that the existing road has also been damaged. Therefore, there could be costs associated with road repair works and reduction in service life of the road.
Damage to Third Party Apparatus
Regulatory Fines (NJDEP, NJBPU, OHSA, etc.): Fines for failure to follow rules and regulations.
Repair Costs: Due to explosion, there could be damage of telephone poles, overhead wires, businesses and so on. Therefore, costs associated with repair work of nearby utilities.
Loss of Income: Measure the amount of time that an asset is out of action. Calculate the loss of income for this duration based on revenue earned at a comparable time.

Social Cost

Social Costs are those that affects the society and they will not be compensated, they affect the communities near the incident, the environment and the surrounding infrastructure. Social costs usually cannot be assigned to a party because they are related to environment, safety and so on. They are associated with negative effects or externalities of the incident/construction work and include the following indicators:

Costs to Highway Users: Cost associated with speed change, queuing, stopping, detour, costs associated with delay in pedestrian walk time, cost associated with delay due to traffic, and costs associated with increased collision rate.
Costs to Business: Damage of property (equipment, gas released, land, etc.) costs and loss of income from customers.
Environmental Damage: Cost associated with air pollution, noise, dust and dirt pollution, damaging the trees, waste disposal and so on.
Safety: Cost associated with workers safety (for instance, a road accident could injure a worker at site), and health costs (working with contaminated soil or material).

RECOMMENDED VALUES/DROPDOWN NUMBERS

Based on extensive research and data collection from municipality and utility companies, following are some of the value that the user could apply in case of any difficulty in providing the exact amount.

For administrative costs, below are the average hourly income of the following labour category:

Occupation	Labour Rates ($/h)
Sr. Engineer	74
Manager	61
Project Engineer	56
Operator	30
Compliance Officer	41
Lawyers	76
Contracted Compliance Personnel	225

For diversion of existing utilities, a round value of $450 can be used towards the overall project.
For lane rental costs in traffic management, following values are recommended:

For emergency responders’ costs, the following rates of the vehicle and staffs are recommended:

Type of Emergency Service	Charge/hour
Fire Personnel - Captain	35
Fire Personnel - Operator	31
Fire Personnel - Fire fighter	24
Fire Truck (100ft Ladder)	100
Fire Truck 1000 GPM	68
Fire Truck `1250 GPM	72.25
Fire Truck 1500 GPM	78.9
Fire Truck 2000 GPM	81.4
Fire Truck (75FT)	117.1
Fire Truck (150FT)	142.75
Fire Truck (Rescure Equipment)	93.47
Ambulance Attendee - Paramedics	17.52
Ambulance Driver	10
Ambulance - 150	28
Ambulance - 210	40.5
Police Wage	21.4
Police Automobile	15.69

According to PSEG, overall construction costs could range from $1000 - $12,000 per project, depending on the size of the repair work.
Loss in parking meter revenue could range from $91 – $239 per day.
Pavement service life reduction could range from $239 - $334 a day.
Regulatory fines from can range from $25,000 - $19.2M depending on the size of the incident.
Recommended value for noise pollution can be $8/day and for dust and dirt can, the cost could range from $61/day - $149/day.
Vehicular Operating Cost could range from $29/day - $2581/day and Traffic Delay could range from $45/day - $8477/day.
Loss of Business income could range from $433/day - $2624/day.

In the tool, there is an option called ‘Cost Catalog’ (as shown in Fig 2 below) where the user will be able to view all the above information.
Figure 2: Cost Catalog
VIEWING PAST CASES
The research team had invested in up to twenty-five case studies for an in depth understanding of types of costs associated with utility strikes and the range of these costs. Five of the cases out of the twenty-five have been uploaded into the webtool (please see Fig 3 below) for user’s reference. These cases range from highest monetary values (Case 1 and Case 2) to the lowest (Case 5).
Figure 3: Viewing past cases
First step is to select the case that the user would like to view from the dropdown list and then click on ‘View Cases’ (circled in Fig 3 above). After selecting the case, the user can view through all the all the types of costs associated with that incident and then finally click on ‘Calculate Total Cost’ to display the total cost (sum of direct, indirect and social costs). For instance, the total cost for Case 3 comes up to $870,878.64 as shown in Fig 4 below.
Figure 4: Total cost for Case 3
The user can extract values from these case studies and enter them into their incident true cost. The final value does not have to be exact; the tool is solely to aid the utility industries and municipalities on the overall impact of a utility strike.
HOW DOES THE COST ESTIMATOR TOOL WORK?

Case Study Background
An explosion and fire at a house in New Brunswick, New Jersey was caused by a gas leak. The fire was in 211-227 George Street, in the heart of New Brunswick city. The explosion was heard around 10:45am. A two-story house was collapsed. No one was killed or injured in the blast. The fire chief says that an excavator struck the gas line causing the house to explode. Investigators mentioned that the mark-out was insufficient. This gas line was present under ROW. The explosion also caused the overhead electrical wires to burn out and there was power outage for almost 2 hours. The local businesses and residences did not have supply to gas for around two days.
Summary of Police Report:
There were five 2000 GPM fire trucks at the site. Three 210hp ambulances and eight police automobiles. There were around five captains, operator each and ten fire firefighters. Three ambulance drivers and six paramedics. Finally, there were around sixteen police officers, including detectives, sergeants, and so on.
Location Profile:
Local businesses included restaurant, pharmacy, grocery store and beauty salon. Around five residences and five businesses were affected due to this incident (with an average income of $65,000). The roadway consisted of a two-lane urban roadway. Pedestrian traffic is slightly heavy, therefore, walking business was significant. Pedestrian traffic flow is very low.
Repair Work:
The method consists of excavating 5 pits to access the pipe buried at an average depth of 1.8m below grade. The pit areas varied from approximately 4m2 to 8m2 and were typically located at all intersections, fire hydrants and valves. The project was completed in 4 working days. The working hours were typically from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. The material and construction cost of the project amounted to $12,000. Excavated volume is around 1000m3 and pavement cut and restored length is around 200m.

For a better understanding on how the tool works, let us consider a hypothetical case:
Total Cost Analysis
The total cost of the project will be estimated using the total cost evaluation tool. This section will provide a step-by-step method on how to use the tool and achieve the total cost that involves direct, indirect and social cost.
Basic Information:

At first, the user would start off by entering basic information about the incident in the tool, as shown in Fig 5. In our case study, the Address would be: “211 – 227 George Street”; GPS Location: “40°29'21.9"N 74°26'29.2"W”; Date: “11/11/2018”; Project Duration: 4 days = “96 hours”.
Figure 5: Basic Information
Direct Cost
Material and Construction Cost
The user can enter the total amount according to their respective project OR enter a recommended value which is between $1000 and $12,000. In this case, the amount comes up to $12,000.
Traffic Management
Traffic Management Cost is the sum of Lane Rental Cost and Traffic Control Devices Cost. As you point your arrow towards the blue question mark, there is a list of few recommended values. In our case, since the work was from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. during the weekdays for four days. The total cost can be valuated from the calculator as shown in Fig 6, the lane rental in our case is 6000 x 4 = $24,000
Figure 6: Recommended values for Lane Rental

Diversion of Existing Utility Tool
The user can enter a value of their own or a recommended value of $450.
Administrative Cost
Assuming that for this case there were one Sr. Engineer, one Manager, two Operators and one Compliance Officer, the total hourly rate for all the staff members would be 74 + 61 + 30 + 30 + 41 = $236/h. The user can use the calculator (similar to Fig 6) to calculate the overall administrative cost. The total value of their work would be 236 x 96 (project duration) = $22,656
Emergency Response Cost
The user would just have to enter the number of hours the responders were at site and the number of trucks and personnel. The total cost will be automatically evaluated as shown in Fig 7 below. If the user wants to add their own total emergency responders cost then it can be entered manually as well.
In our case study the total emergency responders cost comes up to $10,896.16
Figure 7: Direct Cost
Therefore, the total value of the direct cost is $70,002.16
Indirect Cost
Loss of Income
This varies from case to case, person to person and business to business, the user would have to enter a value based on their research or make an educated guess. For this case, the average annual income for all the five businesses were $65,000. One way to calculate the loss of income would be $65,000 x 5 = $325,000. Therefore, their monthly and daily income would be $27,083.33 and $902.78. Since the gas was out for two days, loss of income for the two days for all five businesses joined will be 902.78 x 2 = $1,805.6.
Regulatory Fines
Since there is no schedule of fines given for utility damages, one way to enter an amount would be by referring to the past cases in the tool. Since it is a house explosion due to insufficient mark-out, this case could be compared to Case 4 from past cases, possible fine could come up to $75,000.
Costs to Highway Authorities
For cost of reduction in pavement life, the user just must insert the length of road under repair work as shown below in Fig 8. In our case study, since 200m is under repair work, the total cost will come up to $22,000.
Figure 8: Costs to Highway Authorities
Loss of Parking Revenues
If the user is unaware of the occupancy frequency, then the recommended value $91 - $239/day can be entered. In this case study, since there are no metered parking spaces, the value will remain zero as shown in Fig 9.
Figure 9: Loss of Parking Revenues Cost
Repair Costs
For adjacent buried utility damage cost, the user just must enter the excavated volume and the material and construction cost. Therefore, in this case study the buried utility damage repair cost will be $53 (refer Fig 10 below).
Figure 10: Repair Costs
Therefore, the total value of indirect cost is $98,858.6
Social Cost
Costs to Business
Cost to Business is a sum of income lost for the business and property damage. Since the value of property damage varies from case to case, one way to enter this amount would be by referring to the past cases in the tool. Since the case is a house explosion, this case could be compared to Case 4 from past cases, the amount could come up to $415,125.
For loss of business, let us assume that there was 10% reduction due to this incident. Therefore, the loss of income can be calculated using the below formula shown in Fig 11. The total costs to business are 415,125 + 600 = $415,725
Figure 11: Cost to Business
Cost to Highway Users
For Increased Vehicular Operating Cost, since there are no detours in this case the value will come up to zero. For Increased Collision Rate, the average increase in collision rate for urban vehicles are 60.86/1000 veh-km and AADT can be found from the link circled in the Fig 12 below. In this case, the value of the increased collision rate would be $480.65. For traffic delay cost, since travel time during normal conditions and travel time during controlled time is unknown, an average number of the recommended values can be considered in this case, which comes up to $4261. Since, the pedestrian flow is very low, the value can be considered as zero. Therefore, the total cost to Highway Users come up to $4741.65.
Figure 12: Cost to Highway Users
Environment Costs
The user would have to input all numbers required in the formula or can consider any of the recommended values as shown in Fig 13 below, in this case the recommended values are inputted.
Figure 13: Environmental Costs
Therefore, the total value of the social cost is $420,579.65.
Once all the values have been entered, the user can click on the ‘Calculate Total Cost’ to attain the total cost and can also click on ‘General Excel File’ for a proper breakdown of the costs. Refer below Fig 14 below for the overall cost.
Figure 14: Sum of Direct, Indirect and Social Cost
Therefore, the total cost of the utility repair work is $589,440.41
If the user wants to find a value for an individual cost category or sub-categories, the user can enter the values and then click the ‘Update Formula’ on the right side of the web page link as shown below in Fig 15.
Figure 15: Update Formula Link