Ohio & Mahoning Valley - Digging is a situation that can mean anything from a minor inconvenience to a mass evacuation like the valley saw in Leetonia weeks ago. In some cases, like the Realty building, gas leaks can even have deadly consequences.

And while they're often caused by human error, there is surprisingly little in place to prevent them and rarely any serious consequences for causing them, even when someone ends up dead.

So, do the rules in place actually have any teeth?

Ohio law, in theory, has two layers to protect you from potential disaster from gas leaks.

The first layer is a requirement that anyone who puts a shovel in the ground calls in advance so utilities can be marked.

“Within 48 hours, they're going to arrive on the site. They're going to identify their utilities, if there are any there, and they're going to go ahead and mark them so that you can begin digging at the end of 48 hours in a safe manner,” said Roger Lipscomb, executive director of Ohio 811.

The second are fines when disaster does strike and there's a leak or, in cases like the Realty building, an explosion.

But what happens if someone doesn't call, and disaster strikes? In Ohio, the only way a company can even potentially face fines is if someone voluntarily reports the problem to the State Public Utilities Commission (PUCO).

“In other states, enforcement is driven by an incident or an issue. There was damage, there was some kind of a near miss, there was some kind of a situation like that. In Ohio, our revised code and our excavation laws are governed much by compliance,” said Lipscomb.

The Common Ground Alliance, a national nonprofit committed to reducing damages to the critical underground structure, has tracked an increase in damage done by third party workers, some with devastating results.

“There is a lot of competing interests out there to try to get their infrastructure underground. And so part of the challenge is that legislation and law, both state and federal, haven't really kept up with that,” said Sarah Magruder Lyle, president and CEO of the Common Ground Alliance.

PUCO numbers show 160 Utility strikes in Ohio led to $204,750 in fines, but more than $63,000 are unpaid to date. And only three of those damaged utilities fines were from the Valley in all of 2024 and 2025.

In some states, enforcement happens when there is an incident. But in Ohio, this is all based on voluntarily reporting the issue. That means if a company hits a gas line or causes an explosion, they would either need to actively report themselves or anyone who was affected would need to know to report them to the state. And even then, many fines simply go unpaid.

“I would like the states to actually not only pass, you know, language and legislation that protects the communities and put safety first, but they also have to ensure that they have an enforcement mechanism that will actually drive behavior change, because you can have the best law, like I said, on the books, but if nobody is enforcing it, it doesn't matter,” said Lyle.

Lyle believes the current state of things can't remain and that changes are inevitable.

“It is not if it’s going to happen, it is when it is going to happen,” said Lyle. “We have to look at the overall consequences of what happens when it does because it only takes one.”