From Data Scarcity to Data Fatigue: A New Risk in Geohazard Management

What are the risks of data fatigue?

For pipeline operators, the stakes surrounding geohazard management are enormous. Although geohazard related pipeline failures are relatively rare, their impacts are disproportionately high:

• Multi-million-dollar remediation efforts,
• massive environmental damage,
• and even loss of life.

The uncomfortable truth is that these events are rarely due to a lack of awareness. They are often due to delays in action caused by disconnected data and friction in the risk management process.

Traditional Approaches

Traditional approaches to geohazard management rely heavily on expert judgement, visual observations and interpretations. The good news is that these approaches still hold a lot of value. The bad news is that they do not scale effectively and are prone to the types of delays mentioned above.

Traditional approaches rely on local knowledge, plus they are prone to individual bias and human error. They are costly to apply over larger geographies, causing a real problem for operators who run long-distance transmission pipelines.

Scaling Geohazard Management

So, what’s the answer? On one level, advancements in remote sensing technology offer a solution. When used alongside more traditional approaches, remote sensing brings scalability where traditional expertise brings reliability. There is another problem, however. What these technologies deliver in terms of scale they also deliver in terms of complexity.

Asset integrity professionals find themselves cross-referencing various databases, software solutions, and legacy records searching for answers. New datasets often mean reinterpreting risk models. The issue for most modern operators isn’t insufficient data, it’s leveraging the right data at the right time.

Regulatory Context

Things get even tougher when you consider that regulatory requirements are increasing. CSA Z662-23 and API 1187 both expect operators to establish formal geohazard management programs that include:

• hazard identification and tracking
• ongoing monitoring and mitigation
• defensible, documented hazard management decisions.

Why does this matter?

This all matters because the avilability of data and complexity of data sources is always increasing. Data scarcity is no longer the issue; it’s data fatigue that operators need to worry about.

Geohazard teams have to reconcile vast and varied datasets which arrive in different formats, at different times, and at different resolutions. What’s more, typically this information is hosted on a variety of different systems. If all this data isn’t consolidated, then finding critical information becomes trying to find a needle in a haystack. This leads to friction, which leads to delay, which leads to increased risk. In some cases, months can pass before key observations are recognised and mitigations are carried out, with assets at risk the entire time.

How do we fix it?

This question prompted a partnership between Thurber Engineering and Klarian. Thurber are geotechnical experts who have been operating across Canada for nearly 70 years, and Klarian are pipeline experts with a focus on finding meaning and opportunities is vast quantities of data. The result of this partnership was Orkus, a geohazard management platform designed by experts who were fed up with the current state of things.

The idea of Orkus is simple: give geotechnical experts a tool to capture assets, hazards, and remote sensing data in one place. It’s a single source of truth that cuts low value, high friction tasks out of the workflow. That means:

• No more searching multiple databases for critical information
• No more repetitive data entry (Orkus links assets and hazards spatially so nothing is missed)
• No more disjointed workflows (Orkus supports the full assessment-to-action workflow, and is customisable to your operations)

In a world of data fatigue, the new gold standard of geohazard management is a coherent, queryable single-source-of-truth. Orkus has been designed with this in mind.

If managing geohazard data is a headache email Info@klarian.com