With experience stemming from its origin as the central fault and emergency centre for Victoria’s Gas and Fuel Corporation, and now owned by Origin Energy, the National Response Centre (NRC) has been providing a wide range of emergency, health and safety response services to energy, mining and utility businesses across Australia for over 50 years.
Response services:
While the NRC was initially established to manage inbound emergency calls and outbound dispatch activities for the Victorian gas distribution network, today, the NRC handles thousands of calls ranging from emergency and employee safety monitoring to dispatching of field service teams. The NRC is also the first point of contact for many national emergency hotlines.
Each day, the NRC’s Melbourne-based response team answers a range of calls from the public, emergency services, regulators, utilities, meter readers, and upstream field workers. It assists with a range of scenarios from gas leaks, power and gas outages, asset alarms, crisis team mobilisations, employee welfare checks, water issues, and municipal enquiries.
The NRC works 24/7 to manage issues and escalations in line with regulatory and customer requirements. It can incorporate their customers’ systems and processes with the NRC’s streamlined response operations.
Employee safety monitoring:
The NRC also provides monitoring services to ensure the welfare and safety of employees undertaking high risk activities including driving long distances, working alone or working in remote locations. Employees log these activities via the NRC or using the monitoring app, TraXu, allowing the NRC to actively monitor check-ins, closures and escalate where necessary.
“We are entrusted with the safety of people performing high risk activities and we understand how important that is. I am proud of the way we can adapt to changing circumstances, and deal with real time incidents,” NRC group manager Shane Rayner.
The NRC has supported its customers’ response efforts across major events such as cyclones, floods, bushfires as well as significant outages. In these scenarios it has provided call management, customer communications, delivered fire and weather warnings to field teams, and journey management monitoring so employees and contractors across affected areas can travel and work safely.
Duress, in-vehicle and fatigue camera response:
Another key NRC service is critical event monitoring. All critical events such as vehicle roll-overs, impacts, duress, and fatigue triggered by a fleet’s in-vehicle management system, camera or hand-held in-Reach, SPOT, Blackline, or other customer-procured devices, are received and actioned by the NRC team. The NRC works with businesses to design an effective initial business notification process, and emergency triage support with the driver upon receipt of a critical event notification. Its 24/7 availability means someone is monitoring and responding whenever field teams are on the ground working, giving customers and their employees peace of mind.
Reflecting on the role of the NRC, Shane said, “The team hasn’t missed a beat, and we are held in high regard by our customers for our professionalism and the important job that we do around the clock.”
“The NRC has grown and developed over the last 53 years, and it’s great to see the breadth of support we now provide throughout Australia, helping customers keep their assets, communities and employees safe.”