Dispatch Options

Once it has been determined your service area will be affected by an excavation, Dig|Safely. New York will need to send the excavation details to you. We do this by walking through each destination you have set up, and looking at the various rules attached to it.

A destination is simply a method of sending information to a specific device. Presently, we can send stuff to you the following ways -

Modem (printer / computer)
Fax
Voice (human) call (strongly discouraged)
E-Mail (most useful, but not recommended for life safety: very unreliable, and is not supervised)
SOAP / XML (requires programming skill on your part)

A typical service area must have at least one destination, but may usually have two or more destinations -

Primary destination - this destination, sometimes called the "daytime" destination, is where the majority of notifications will be sent.
Alternate destination - this destination is usually off, unless there is a problem with the primary. It is a backup method of sending notifications and is ready and waiting to go if the Primary becomes unavailable.
Nighttime destination - this optional destination, if you choose, can be used as an additional "wake up" notice in addition to the primary.
Design destination - this destination, if you choose, can be used to route Design Requests to a place other than your normal stake-out group.
Copy destination - this optional destination will receive the same things as some other destination.

For each destination, either of the following filters can be applied - and these filters will be used to decide if a notice will be sent to this destination. Consider which of these filters you'd apply to four destinations to achieve the above "typical setup" -

Use this destination based on priority / lead time of ticket, relative to your service area's business hours. Select any
- Emergencies (0 hours notice, threat to life / property / etc)
- Priorities (0 hours notice, not a threat to life / property / etc)
- Less than 240 minutes
- Over 240 minutes
- Survey / Design request
- Gas Emergency
Use this destination based on priority, relative to calendar business hours (7am-5pm). Select any
- Emergencies (0 hours notice, threat to life / property / etc)
- Priorities (0 hours notice, not a threat to life / property / etc)
- Insufficient Notice (less than two full working days)
- Regular Notice (over two full working days)
- Survey / Design request
- Gas Emergency
Ignore priority / lead time - send all types to this destination

For each destination, sending can be enabled based on your service area's business hours, or based on day of week and time of day, or also based on holidays -

Use this destination 24/7
Use this destination during the business hours of the service area
Use this destination after the business hours of the service area
Use this destination during a custom time period for each / any day of week
Use this destination during holidays

These are the basic rules we can use to create our destination sets. If we were going to create a destination set similar to the example above, we'd most likely do the following -

Primary (daytime) -

Based on priority, relative to calendar business hours
- Enable Emergencies
- Enable Priorities
- Enable Insufficients
- Enable Regulars
Use this destination 24/7
Use this destination on holidays

Alternate (daytime) -

Same as Primary, with the destination disabled

Nighttime -

Based on priority, relative to calendar business hours
- Enable Emergencies
- Enable Priorities
Use this destination after the business hours of the service area
Use this destination if today is a holiday

This would send notices to the Daytime, always. In addition, an additional copy of any "Digging NOW!" stake-outs would be sent to Nighttime whenever your office was closed, or whenever you were on holiday. You might use this to send a copy as a text-message to a cell phone, for example.

In this example, you'll notice that we have made no provision to receive Survey / Design requests - none of the filters on our destinations will allow such a request. We might later decide we wish to handle Design Requests, which are consultations about facility locations during the planning phases of new construction. Obviously, we may not want these types of requests to go to the maintenance division for stake-out... instead, we might want these requests handled by our engineering department. To do this, we'd simply create another destination, 24/7, set only to receive Survey / Design type priorities.