Safety program offered for excavators

The Pipeline Group’s annual “Public Education – Contractor Awareness Program” will be held at 7 p.m. on Oct. 25 in the Green Building at Livingston County Fairgrounds, one mile east of Chillicothe on Highway 36. The program is sponsored by a group of companies with a common goal of preventing accidents and damages to underground pipelines and utilities.

A fee dinner will be catered by Hy-Vee for all persons involved in excavation related activities in Caldwell, Daviess and Livingston counties. Following the dinner, a brief safety program will be presented which stresses the importance of accident prevention by identifying pipeline and utility rights of way, use of one-call systems, and the importance of working with pipeline and utility companies to safely excavate in the vicinity of underground facilities.

Sponsors will provide promotional materials, including notification information for their companies, safety related brochures and other safety reminders.

Each year many lives are injured or lost, plus millions of dollars in repairs and lost products are incurred due to “third party” incidents someone digging into a pipeline. Thousands of communications, some life-threatening, may be disrupted when expensive fiber-optic cables are damaged or severed. These types of excavations can be financially devastating to the responsible party. This safety program is an attempt to help those who do excavation work to avoid such situations.

Sponsoring this program is bp Pipelines (North America) Inc-Platte Pipe Line Co. For more information call 800-982-8752 or visit our web site at www.pipelinegroup.com.