Gold Shovel Standard™ Welcomes Con Edison and Orange & Rockland

Con Edison, Orange & Rockland Join Gold Shovel Excavation Safety Program

Phoenix, AZ (PRWEB) May 10, 2016

Gold Shovel Standard, a non-profit association created to provide a first-of-its-kind excavation safety program, today announced it has joined forces with Con Edison and Orange & Rockland (O&R) to help prevent excavator damage to the utilities' underground facilities.

To achieve that goal, Gold Shovel Standard certifies an excavator's policies and procedures against the Gold Shovel Standard, a set of excavator training procedures designed to protect underground facilities. Gold Shovel standard also publishes a rating, known as an EICO™ score, which is an ongoing measure of an excavator's digging-safety-worthiness.

When the program begins, Gold Shovel Standard will serve as Con Edison's and O&R's primary contractor information management system for excavation safety performance. As a result, contractors performing excavation work for Con Edison and O&R will be required to participate in the Gold Shovel Standard program. Participation in Gold Shovel Standard requires contractors to excavate safely around buried utilities, and demonstrate that performance on a continuous basis, essentially raising the bar for acceptable excavation safety performance.

Robert Boyle, vice president for Construction for Con Edison, said, "Gold Shovel Standard is another important tool we can use to make our employees, contractors and community safer and our business operations more reliable. We need to do everything possible to prevent damage to our underground equipment, and this program will help enormously."

O&R Vice President – Operations Francis Peverly said, "The damage prevention training and performance metrics the Gold Shovel Standard provides helps us take damage prevention to the next higher level of effectiveness."

Con Edison and Orange & Rockland are subsidiaries of Consolidated Edison, Inc. ED, one of the nation's largest investor-owned energy companies, with approximately $13 billion in annual revenues and $46 billion in assets. Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. is a regulated utility providing electric, gas and steam service in New York City and Westchester County, New York; Orange & Rockland Utilities, Inc. is a regulated utility serving customers in a 1,350-square-mile-area in southeastern New York State and adjacent sections of northern New Jersey and northeastern Pennsylvania.

About Gold Shovel Standard – Gold Shovel Standard is a non-profit association created for the purpose of expanding the Gold Shovel Standard program, which was originally pioneered by PG&E, to create a North American scale program, driven by industry and underpinned by data technology, to unify excavation safety under a single broadly meaningful professional brand, that raises the bar for excavation safety. Through peer-to-peer collaboration, and by monitoring the performance of individual excavators across networks and geographies, Gold Shovel Standard will be the first program capable of targeting incentives directly at specific excavation companies on a North American scale.

Gold Shovel Standard Media Relations
Phone: 855-ORO-PALA (855-676-7252)
http://www.goldshovelstandard.com

Con Edison Media Relations
Phone: 212-460-4111
http://www.coned.com

Orange & Rockland Utilities
Phone: 845-577-2430
http://www.oru.com

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/05/prweb13401097.htm