2,198 damages on 1.2 million locate requests — the lowest damage rate Colorado has recorded. The improvement wasn't luck, and it wasn't evenly distributed.
Colorado closed 2024 with 2,198 reported damages against 1,201,868 locate requests — a rate of 1.83 damages per 1,000 tickets. That is the lowest figure in the seven years Colorado 811 has published the data, and it follows a 2022 peak of 4,413 damages at a rate of 4.05.
A 36% year-over-year drop in raw damage count is not a rounding error. It is worth understanding where it came from.
## Volume went up, damages went down
The easy explanation — fewer damages because less digging — doesn't hold. Ticket volume has climbed almost every year, from 920,000 in 2018 to a record 1,233,009 in 2023, settling at 1,201,868 in 2024. Colorado is digging more than it ever has.
What changed is the rate. In 2018 the state ran 3.92 damages per 1,000 tickets. In 2024 it ran 1.83. The same amount of excavation now produces less than half the damage.
## The remaining causes are stubborn
The leading root cause in 2024 was the same one that has led every year since 2018: no notification made to 811 at all. That accounted for 451 damages, 21% of the total. Locator error where facilities went unmarked accounted for 388. Failure to maintain clearance accounted for 272, and digging before potholing another 267.
Read those together and a pattern emerges. The largest single category isn't a hard technical problem — it's people digging without calling. No amount of locating accuracy fixes a ticket that was never opened.
## Where the damage lands
Natural gas facilities took 967 hits, 44% of all damages. Cable television took 435 and electric 392. Telecommunications damages fell to 108, down roughly 94% from 2022 — the single biggest improvement in the dataset.
Contractors were the excavator type in 1,896 of the 2,198 damages, or 86%. Utility crews accounted for 124 and municipalities 58.
## What this means for the Denver metro
The seven-county metro area generated 632,044 locate requests in 2024 — 53% of the state's total — and 857 damages, 39% of the state's total. That works out to 1.36 damages per 1,000 tickets, meaningfully better than the statewide 1.83.
The metro handles more than half of Colorado's excavation volume at a lower damage rate than the state average. That is a genuine achievement, and it is the direct product of the relationships between excavators, locators and facility owners that councils like this one exist to build.
It is also fragile. Boulder County reported 35% of its damages came with no 811 notification; Douglas County 32%; Broomfield 40%. Those are the numbers to work on next.
- DIRT
- statistics
- Colorado 811