Page 6 - Mississippi 811 Magazine 2022 Issue 2

Damage Prevention JD Cox
Thirty-Five Years of Excellence
JD Cox has made a lifetime commitment to damage prevention and safety culture
By Michale Downes Y 811 Magazines
our second quarter Damage Prevention Champion is JD Cox. He’s dedicated decades of his life to keeping workers and
the public safe.
JD Cox has seen a lot of change in the world of underground utilities, and the culture surrounding safe digging has never been stronger.
And nobody has pushed for greater accountability than JD Cox.
As director of safety and loss control for Northcentral Electric Cooperative, a provider of electricity and fiber-to-the-home predominantly in Desoto and Marshall Counties and surrounding communities, JD has worked closely with Northcentral crews, excavating contractors and the
local damage prevention council to increase awareness of the need to call 811 before any digging activity, and to be considerate of the other players in the industry.
“I’ve been in the business for 35
years, and over that time there’s been a substantial change in awareness from where it was in the 1980s to now,” JD said. “There are so many companies with so many underground facilities now that we didn’t have back in the 80s and 90s — it used to be telephone companies and that was about it. Now it’s not uncommon to encounter four or five communications cables side by side.”
Excavation accountability
JD joined Northcentral, which serves about 35,000 members, nine and a half
years ago after retiring from a previous job in the same field. Advances in safer digging techniques and adding more accountability in the state’s dig law have improved the safety of workers and the public, he said.
“Directional boring has been a huge reason for the importance of calling
“Other responsible facility owners can no longer stand by and allow bad actors to continue to get away with not getting locates and damaging facilities,” he said.
JD said he works with his management team to come up with safety programs to train employees to be able to safely complete the tasks they’re asked to do.
“We emphasize call before you dig, not because of a potential outage, but for the safety of our co-workers. We can’t ask them to safely do a task if we haven’t gotten a ticket to do that dig,” he said.
Northcentral handles a lot of their own excavation in-house, but they rely on contractors to handle the current fiber-to-the- home initiative. He’s clear with the company’s contractors that safety is of utmost importance, just as if they were internal employees.
JD said his two biggest
frustrations are when excavators don’t call in a locate at all, and when facility owners don’t respond to locates within the proper time window as required by law. He said it can make for a lot of unproductive time and creates scheduling headaches for excavators. But Mississippi 811’s efforts are paying off, and most stakeholders are becoming more responsible.
“Enforcement has been the biggest positive. The Alleged Violation Reporting system helps when someone is absolutely not requesting a ticket to dig at all, or the operator is not locating their facility in a timely manner
4 • Mississippi 811 2022, Issue 2
JD Cox, Northcentral Electric Cooperative
811. So many companies are drilling now, and that requires a lot of locates,” JD said. “And many states are stepping up to the plate to put teeth in their 811 (dig) laws to protect the lines. Those communications and electric lines are so vital, whether to e-commerce or a doctor’s appointment or other important things you can’t interrupt.”
He pointed out that the reason for adding additional enforcement language to the Mississippi dig law wasn’t to
be punitive but to be corrective and encourage safer digging habits.