The Common Ground Alliance has opened a grant program to move damage prevention technology out of the conference hall and into the field. The budget: up to $25,000 a year. Not per recipient. Total.
According to the announcement, dated Oct. 5 and carried by Construction Equipment Guide, the Damage Prevention Technology & Innovation Grant will fund one-year pilots, and the money may be split across one or more recipients. Applications opened Oct. 1 and close Nov. 30.
Two months earlier, the same organization said strikes on buried utilities cost the country $83.2 billion a year.
Who can apply for the damage prevention technology grant
Not contractors, and not startups. Applicants must be CGA members in good standing with 501(c) nonprofit status and the matching state nonprofit or non-stock corporate registration. In practice that probably points at one-call centers and regional damage prevention groups, which would then bring a vendor or an excavator along as a pilot partner. The technology or process has to be ready for a real-world trial, not a lab demo.
CGA is prioritizing three areas it calls Next Practices:
- Mapping and recordkeeping
- Technology and process enhancements
- Compliance tracking and data gathering
A stakeholder panel will score proposals on need, readiness, expected damage reduction, metrics, scalability, budget and risk, among other criteria. The announcement doesn’t say who sits on the panel, how many awards it expects to make or when winners will be named.
Utility strike costs: $83.2 billion against a $25,000 pilot fund
Set the grant next to CGA’s own numbers and the scale problem is obvious. Its August study, reported by Underground Infrastructure, put the annual cost of underground utility damage at $83.2 billion, nearly triple the $30 billion benchmark the industry had used since 2019. Direct repairs were $4.9 billion of that. The rest was indirect: outages, business disruption, road closures, emergency response.
Its DIRT report counted 221,717 damage reports for 2025, a record. Telecom and cable lines took 51% of the hits and natural gas 36%. The leading cause hasn’t changed in years. Somebody dug without calling 811.
That last point deserves some skepticism about what technology can fix. No sensor helps when the locate ticket was never opened. Where tools do have a shot is on the other side of the ticket, in late locates, stale facility maps and records that never get corrected after a crew finds a line three feet from where the paint said it was. Excavators complain about those constantly, and all three sit inside CGA’s priority list.
Why a small utility locating pilot could still matter to excavators
The dollars are a rounding error. The strings are the interesting part.
Grant recipients have to share the funded solution and the pilot results, contribute to a case study and support wider adoption. Ownership, licensing and royalty-free use requirements apply, though the announcement doesn’t spell them out. That’s a publishing mandate, and this corner of the industry is short on published field results. Contractors already run plenty of trials; the share piloting automation nearly tripled in one benchmarking survey this year. Few of those trials produce numbers anyone else can check.
One caveat on sourcing. CGA’s site refused automated access when we tried to read the original posting, so the terms here come from the trade press version of the release.
So judge this one on what gets printed after the one-year pilots wrap. A measured drop in strikes per thousand locate tickets, from a named pilot, would be worth more than the check.