To discover the executive summary

This study presents a complete redesign of the tool used to estimate the socio-economic costs associated with damage to underground infrastructure in Canada, originally developed by CIRANO in 2015. The 2026 version expands the geographical coverage to all Canadian provinces, enhances the estimation framework by incorporating four new cost categories (additional road accidents avoided, evacuation, water service interruptions, and property damage resulting from water main breaks), updates the existing methodologies, and refines all calculations at the census subdivision level (approximately 4,000 local areas).

The tool processes data from the DIRT database, a voluntary reporting system in which infrastructure owners record damages caused by third parties. It estimates eight categories of indirect costs depending on the type of infrastructure affected, the geographical location, and the magnitude of the incident.

Applied to Quebec data from 2023 to 2025, the tool estimates annual indirect costs ranging from 36 to 47 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.