Assessment of the socio-economic costs of damages to underground infrastructure in Canada
To discover the executive summary
This article presents the complete overhaul of the tool for estimating the socio-economic costs of damage to underground infrastructure in Canada, originally developed by CIRANO in 2015.
The 2026 version expands the geographic coverage to include all Canadian provinces, enriches the estimation framework with four new cost categories (additional avoided road accidents, evacuation, water service interruption, material damage from water main breaks), updates existing methodologies, and, most importantly, refines all calculations at the census subdivision level (approximately 4,000 local areas). The tool processes data from the DIRT database, a repository of third-party infrastructure damages voluntarily reported by infrastructure owners.
It estimates eight categories of indirect costs based on the type of damaged infrastructure, geographic location, and severity of the damage.
Applied to Canadian data from 2024, the tool estimates annual indirect costs of 160 million Canadian dollars. These estimates remain conservative due to certain inherent limitations of the damage database. Nonetheless, they provide robust orders of magnitude to inform prevention strategies and support data-driven decision-making.
