Page 18 - Mississippi 811 Magazine 2022 Issue 2

Ask Your Audience What They Want
Preventing third-party damages with excavators and training emergency responders on
how to respond in the event there is a pipeline emergency are top
of mind for pipeline companies every day. So, with all the options within the industry, a common question for our consultants at Paradigm is, what option is most effective and well received by the excavator and emergency response stakeholder audiences. A common response we have is, ask them. Ask your stakeholders what works best for them.
Paradigm utilized stakeholder focus group tests consistently to help drive our programs in the right direction. The purpose and goals are always effective training. Interactions with these stakeholder groups tell us that the most desired form of training is face to face. This is why Paradigm continues to bring operators, emergency responders and excavators together to sit down
together and train for the scenarios we all hope never happens.
Meeting regulation is also never far from the minds of operators and is certainly a top priority for Paradigm. CoRE and CoRE-EX programs provide the operator a chance to bring the elements of the regulation to fruition. Learn. Acquaint. Identify. Plan.
With Covid and ever-changing ways to learn, Paradigm has several software platforms to assist in compliance
efforts in a number of ways. In 2010 PHMSA issued an advisory bulletin reminding operators to make available their local emergency response plans
to local emergency response officials. Emergency Response Portal is the key to safely providing this information to the response agency with a reporting tool that gives the operator the ability to see who, what, and when the documents are accessed. The idea that an app would be accessed during an incident
is farfetched. The goal of Paradigm’s platform is to prepare the responders BEFORE they need it. To date, there are over 3,500 emergency responders accessing this platform for important information.
With the introduction of Covid, Paradigm had to get creative in the way the training would be delivered. When the virtual training was our only option, we turned to technology to assist. Training Center was born to provide another avenue to train 24/7 365 days a year at your own pace. Training Center has been the training avenue for nearly 2,000 stakeholders across 42 states.
To think that there is only one way
to bring people together is a thought of the past, but if you ask your stakeholders what they want, I think you would be surprised that they want to be in the same room with operators and peers interacting around a table.
16 • Mississippi 811 2022, Issue 2