How SAGE Service helped Yarra Valley Water get all monitoring sites back up and running within 24 hours, while managing to avoid any sewerage overflows or fines, amid storms and loss of power.
Dean Goulding, SAGE Service Manager
“Our team’s ability to escalate and triage the calls meant that the work was able to be completed within the required response time.”
Challenge
One October night in 2016, storms in the north and east of Victoria eliminated power.
Yarra Valley Water have a responsibility to ensure there’s no overflows of sewerage for their managed areas via remote monitoring. These monitoring sites had depleted their battery backup as a result of power loss. Power was gradually being restored, but they had communications problems and needed
to monitor all of their water sites to understand if there were any overflows imminent.
As Yarra Valley Water’s service support provider for telemetry, SAGE Service Victoria was called.
Solution
SAGE Service’s National Operations Centre (NOC) received 15 calls from 5:30pm till 7am the next morning. The rate of calls, stormy weather and geographically dispersed sites with poor visibility posed some challenges, so a triage response team was set up.
The Senior Service Technician travelled to the sites, while a second Service Technician was called in to answer calls, triage them and guide the Senior Technician to site safely. A third Technician then took all unrelated calls. The technicians worked through-out the night and morning, resolving all sites
alarms that could be resolved.
Of note, third party data from the power authority and Telstra was used to understand where the outages were and what could be repaired. In addition, alarms were prioritised to address Yarra Valley Water’s main risk of sewerage overflow due to high rainfall, as overflows would incur fines for the utility.
Outcome
- No related fines for Yarra Valley Water
- All sites back up and running in less than 24 hours
- Triage response ensured high risk sites addressed first
- Full safety compliance for all site engagement
- Met required response time of 30 minutes and a resolution time of 2 hours per site
Technology used:
- ClearSCADA
- SCADAPACK
- Radio Networks
- WAN modems
