About Irth Solutions

Irth Solutions, a Blackstone portfolio company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, provides enterprise-wide software solutions for customers in the electric, energy, telecommunications, and media industries. Irth is best known for protecting critical network infrastructure and underground assets through damage prevention and land management tools.

For over 25 years, Irth’s mission has been to improve resilience and reduce risk to assets through data-driven insights. To that end, their damage prevention platform has been the leading provider of 811 ticket management software since 1995. Additionally, Irth's training platform is the preferred training platform for the Common Ground Alliance, which provides training for damage prevention personnel. 

Better Together

Similar to OneBridge's mission, Irth Solutions is dedicated to protecting and preserving the assets of its customers through software solutions driven by data and the application of data science and machine learning. When OneBrige integrated with Irth in November 2024, several potential integration points were identified that made us excited for our future as Irthlings.

Please note that the following are ideas we are currently vetting with our existing clientele to gauge interest as well as determine the feasibility of said implementation. 

Damage Prevention: Dig locations synced with Irth's ticket management system

CIM’s assessment analysis process allows users to identify anomalies from the inline inspection report to be evaluated or repaired “in the field.” Before digging on a buried pipeline, however, an 811 ticket must be created to alert other utilities in the area to “mark” or identify the location of their buried utilities in the vicinity of the proposed dig. This is to ensure that the contractor digging up the pipeline doesn’t damage another pipeline or utility in the process. Typically, dig lists with location information are sent to a contractor or local field operations team, who then spends time manually entering one-call tickets one by one.

What if we could send the GPS coordinates and KML file for every dig generated by CIM’s Dig Management process directly to Irth’s damage prevention platform with the click of a button?

Because Irth now manages both platforms, the platform where digs are identified and the leading 811 ticket management platform, this idea may soon be a reality. 

Land Management: Schedule digs based on landowner information

Similar to sending dig location information directly to the one-call platform, having the ability to identify affected landowners can create efficiencies that are currently not being realized. Per local regulations and company requirements, different anomalies are required to be evaluated by differing timelines, sometimes requiring pipeline operators to dig on the same landowner's property multiple times in a 5 or 7-year period. However, if the integrity personnel can access landowner information, organizing the digs so landowners are impacted only once is much more ideal for both the landowner and the pipeline operator. Additionally, providing the land management department with more visibility into the digs and landowners impacted in the future has many benefits as well. 

Figure 1: Map view of anomalies identified from an analysis in CIM. 

Third-Party Damage: Identify if 811 tickets correlate to dents and mechanical damage

There are various conditions in CIM that identify mechanical damage, dents with metal loss, and a particularly helpful condition called “New Dent” (which identifies any dents in the current data set that were not in the previous) that can be selected when analyzing inline inspection data. This is because third-party damage, aka other-party damage, remains a leading cause of pipeline failures. Indeed, a topside dent with metal loss is considered an immediate condition in high consequence areas for both hazardous liquid and gas pipelines.

What if the platform could tell the pipeline operator if there has been a one-call ticket submitted in the vicinity for a dent with metal loss, mechanical damage, or a new dent that’s identified in an inline inspection report?

Not only could this provide valuable information regarding the cause of the anomaly, but it could alert the pipeline operator to take immediate risk mitigation measures, e.g., pressure reduction, which could ultimately prevent a pipeline failure. Understanding the location and density of 811 tickets could allow for quantifying the threat of outside party damage for risk assessments. 

Figure 2: Joint view showing a topside dent with metal loss and associated information. 

Geohazard Management: monitoring and mitigating threats outside the pipeline

PHMSA issued an advisory bulletin in 2019 with an update provided in May 2022 to address “Earth Movement and Other Geological Hazards,” reminding pipeline operators that landslides and subsidence pose a serious integrity threat and should be assessed and mitigated. Various mitigative measures were recommended by PHMSA, including assessing pipelines to determine the risk that geohazards pose, developing plans to monitor for geohazards, and utilizing remote monitoring to understand changes in ground conditions.

Although the CIM platform has historically focused on threats stemming from the pipe itself, a more holistic approach is needed to mitigate this threat of “outside forces.” Enter Irth and its partnership with Boston Geospatial, which provides geospatial intelligence via screening tools as well as monitoring and alert solutions. In fact, a current Irth client is utilizing Boston Geospatial's real-time remote monitoring for earthquakes, i.e., seismic alerts, which are currently brought in through Irth's Damage Prevention platform (Utilisphere). Seismic events are monitored every few minutes, and the intensity of the event is estimated and compared to a threshold value. If any asset falls within the radius of intensity higher than the threshold, an insight notification is generated within the platform. This capability of utilizing publicly available data in conjunction with engineering models that calculate the stress and strain experienced by the pipeline can be extended to assess the risk of other geohazards, including fault movement, earth movement (from subsidence or other processes), landslides, and sinkholes.

Threat Integration: integrating soil data and earth movement with ILI data

Additional data sets that Boston Geospatial has access to (or can measure) are soil data and changes in depth of cover. Being able to correlate soil data with anomalies found in inline inspection data could help pipeline operators better understand the cause of the anomaly and the severity of the existing threat. Seeing external corrosion at the 10 and 2 o'clock orientation might indicate coating disbondment, but knowing that the soil type is clay (or another heavy soil that retains water) increases the probability that it is. A new area of shallow external corrosion may not meet a company's criteria for evaluation, but knowing that there's new external corrosion on a pipeline buried in high resistivity soil (potentially preventing a protective level of cathodic protection from reaching the pipeline) could. New topside corrosion and low depth of cover could indicate seasonal exposure of the pipeline.

Pipeline cracking is typically oriented in the axial direction due to hoop stress caused by internal pressure from the product being transferred. However, circumferential cracking may indicate that the pipeline is experiencing bending strains, which could be indicative of earth movement. Therefore, correlating any circumferential cracks with the outputs of an earth movement susceptibility model could be extremely beneficial for identifying a serious integrity concern. 

Figure 3: Built-in threat detection report that utilizes data science to identify potential areas of coating disbondment, leading to external corrosion. 

Utilizing Irth's Training Platform & Digital Form Capabilities

Updating training for CIM is on our to-do list, and lucky for us, Irth has a fully comprehensive training platform that currently provides and manages training for damage prevention personnel. We're also excited to leverage Irth’s personnel, who excel at creating and designing training programs, and adopt that to improve our existing training for CIM.

Irth also currently offers a number of digital forms for maintenance inspections, monitoring an excavation, and investigating outside party damage. Extending these forms to also capture digs generated by an assessment analysis is a no-brainer. 

Figure 4: Training provided by the Common Ground Alliance, hosted by Irth's training Coursettra

Are you as excited about our integration with Irth as we are? We'd love to hear from you. Drop us a comment or question at marketing@onebridgesolutions.com.