About
A room where everybody who touches a dig can talk to each other
DMDPC is a volunteer council. We have no regulatory authority and we don't want any — what we have is the ability to get excavators, utility owners, locators and municipalities in the same room before something goes wrong.
What we do
The council exists to prevent damage to underground facilities, protect public safety, and protect the environment — through stakeholder education and communication across the Denver metro area.
In practice that means four things:
- Bringing stakeholders together. Bi-monthly meetings and events where excavators, facility owners, locators and municipalities work through real problems face to face.
- Educating excavators. Safe digging practices, the requirements of Colorado law, and what actually causes damages here.
- Reaching the public. Homeowners are the people least likely to know that 811 exists, is free, and is legally required.
- Reviewing local damage data. Colorado 811 publishes damage figures by county. We look at ours and act on them.
Why a local council
Damage prevention is national in its standards and intensely local in its practice. The Common Ground Alliance writes the best practices and Colorado 811 runs the notification system, but whether a particular locator and a particular excavator can resolve a recurring problem in Adams County comes down to whether they know each other.
That is the whole function of a damage prevention council. We have no enforcement power — that belongs to the Underground Damage Prevention Safety Commission, and in some cases to home rule cities like Denver and Aurora. What a council provides is the relationships that keep disputes from becoming complaints in the first place.
The results
In 2024 the seven counties DMDPC serves generated 632,044 locate requests — 53% of Colorado's total — and 857 damages, or 39% of the state's. That works out to 1.36 damages per 1,000 tickets against a statewide rate of 1.83.
The metro handles more than half of Colorado's excavation at a meaningfully lower damage rate. We would like to claim all the credit and cannot — but the relationships built at meetings like ours are a real part of it.
How we're organized
DMDPC is a volunteer council supported entirely by event sponsorship. There are no membership dues. Colorado's regional councils are affiliated through the Association of Colorado Damage Prevention Councils (AOCDPC), the statewide umbrella organization.
Colorado 811 staffs Education & Damage Prevention field liaisons who cover the state, and works closely with the councils. Our region is served by the Denver Metro & Northeast liaison.