Everything is bigger in Texas – including the infrastructure problems.

Oncor, the largest electricity delivery company in the Lone Star State, was experiencing issues related to the inaccurate as-builts of their expansive power transmission infrastructure. The Dallas-based company had even experienced a large utility strike due to the inaccurate data, which was impeding their ability to provide safe, reliable power to their millions of customers.

When Oncor needed to quickly and safely conduct repairs and upgrades to some of their high-voltage electrical lines within the Dallas-Fort Worth area, they knew they couldn’t afford a costly and potentially dangerous mistake. They called GPRS, who provided them with the accurate and complete infrastructure data they needed to stay on time, on budget, and safe.

Business Development Manager Boon Bowling was part of the team from GPRS who met with representatives from Oncor to discuss their utility locating needs.

“Dallas is growing so rapidly,” Bowling said. “Some of these lines are old, some of them have been replaced and not always tracked, and even some of the locations where they were initially run, where it was an empty lot, now it’s places like Victory Plaza in downtown Dallas near the American Airlines Center. So, now there’s big, multi-story structures on top of what was an empty lot when those lines were installed, and their maps all still say it’s an empty lot.”

GPRS Area Manager Zachary Walter joined Bowling to conduct a demonstration for the Oncor team at and around one of their substations, showcasing GPRS’ industry-leading subsurface investigation process.

At the heart of this process is SIM: the Subsurface Investigation Methodology.

SIM Explained

SIM serves as a guide for professional utility locating companies, with a standard operating procedure and set of professional specifications for conducting utility locates and precision concrete scanning.

GPRS requires all its Project Managers to achieve SIM 101 certification. To do this, they must complete 80 hours of hands-on training in a classroom setting and 320 hours of mentorship in the field. By comparison, the American Society for Nondestructive Testing’s (ASNT) minimum recommendation to achieve NDT Level 1 certification in ground penetrating radar (GPR) scanning is just eight hours of classroom training and 60 hours of field practice.

When conducting utility locating or concrete imaging, the SIM process mandates use of multiple, complementary technologies to capitalize on each tool’s strengths and achieve a redundant confirmation of results.

GPRS Project Managers utilize GPR scanners and electromagnetic (EM) locators when locating buried utilities.

GPR scanners emit radio waves into the ground or a concrete slab, then detect the interactions between these signals and any buried utilities or other subsurface obstructions.

EM locators detect the electromagnetic signals radiating from metallic pipes and cables. These signals can be created by the locator’s transmitter applying current to the pipe or from current flow in a live electrical cable or result from a conductive pipe acting as an antenna and re-radiating signals from stray electrical fields and communications transmissions.

How SIM & SiteMap® Helped Oncor Visualize its Buried Infrastructure

Bowling and Walter’s demonstration of GPRS’ SIM-certified utility locating process helped Oncor see the value of having accurate, complete as-builts of their buried infrastructure.

“They were thrilled with the accuracy and success of that, the level of documentation, especially within the substation, with additional photographs of key features and items that they really did not have an existing record of,” Bowling said.

GPRS ultimately located and mapped roughly 55 miles of high-voltage electrical lines throughout the DFW area. The Project Managers navigated everything from areas in the heart of Dallas with heavy traffic to secure locations such as around airports to obtain the information Oncor’s team needed to safely and efficiently complete their line repairs and upgrades.

“We had two outstanding Project Managers on the project full-time, basically,” Bowling said. “They’re killing it… [Oncor] is very pleased with the quality of the data we provided.”

All this accurate, field-verified data was uploaded into SiteMap® (patent pending), GPRS’ intuitive, interactive infrastructure mapping software solution designed to provide existing conditions documentation to protect your assets and people.

With their SiteMap Team access, Oncor had 24/7, secure access to their critical infrastructure data from any computer, tablet, or smartphone, enabling them to plan, design, manage, dig, and ultimately, build better.

With GPRS’ SIM-certified utility locating data at their fingertips thanks to SiteMap, Oncor was able to ensure they can continue bringing safe, reliable power to their millions of customers.

GPRS’ SiteMap experts are scheduling live, personal SiteMap demos. Click below to schedule your free demo today!