What happens when you call because you smell gas in the kitchen?

The Emergency Care Control Center (CCAU) of Nedgia, Naturgy's gas distributor, manages emergency calls that, for example, customers make when they smell gas in the kitchen.

As critical infrastructure, the CCAU is protected. One must pass through several security controls before accessing the area where it is located, which is also protected with bulletproof glass. With COVID, all these protocols have had to be reinforced even further.

Nedgia's CCAU answers calls in less than fifty seconds, and the response time for emergency actions throughout Spain is 27 minutes.

The CCAU usually receives about 300,000 calls a year—more than 820 a day. Many times, Nedgia customers call the emergency number (900 750 750) for problems with their gas bills, which are not managed from this line. Thus, the initial figure is reduced to about 80,000 calls that result in incidents requiring the mobilization of personnel to resolve themor, to a lesser extent, from emergency services to deal with a fire or an explosion.

Specifically, most of the calls they manage, approximately 30%, correspond to small gas leaks. After that, there are incidents caused when works are carried out on the road and a pipe through which gas circulates is affected, with a greater impact, since they can leave entire streets or neighborhoods without supply. More frequent in times of economic growth, when there is more investment and more works, in recent years these emergencies stand at around a thousand per year. As for fires or explosions, the annual figure is anecdotal.

Like so many other things, these figures have been affected by the pandemic. Covid reduced the number of calls received by the CCAU during 2020 with the halt of all non-essential activity during the toughest months. Specifically, the total volume stood at 260,000 and 62,200 required some type of intervention.

Classified according to severity

Calls that require the CCAU to send an operator or call emergencies are classified according to their severity. Of the total of 80,000 calls on average in a normal year, the most serious correspond to a possible gas leak or a defect in the supply and stand at around 15,000. Calls are answered in less than five minutes and the response time for this type of emergency is 27 minutes for all of Spain, both in large cities and more rural areas. Other less serious ones where the risk is controlled are resolved between 40 and 120 minutes.

The classification of calls can be seen on one of the CCAU screens, where Nedgia workers are in charge of attending to the most serious ones and those that require the mobilization of an operator, after they have been discerned from all those received in an external call center. The moment the emergency call is made, an operator is sent or it is resolved are also registered in the list, which includes the address and the municipality from where it occurs.

CCAU workers are in charge of attending to the most serious calls and those that require the mobilization of an operator, after they have been discerned from all those received in a previous process

On the rest of the screens, Twitter can be seen, a tool they use at the CCAU to fully grasp the seriousness of the call. It also helps them detect emergencies that may not have picked up the phone yet. Likewise,they have time and traffic open, to adapt and better manage emergencies, preventing operators from having to drive through traffic jams or closed streets.

The CCAU is open 24 hours a day all year round, with various engineers and technicians, a number that increases in the winter season, when greater energy use causes more incidents. With COVID, the Barcelona CCAU shares work with the one in Sant Cugat del Vallès, where Nedgia has a reinforcement center in case the one in the Catalan capital fails, but which the pandemic has activated to guarantee bubble groups. From Barcelona and Sant Cugat, emergencies throughout Spain are controlled.

Supply network control

Although the CCAU is where a good part of incident management begins, Nedgia complements telephone support with another space called Dispatching, which also operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Two distributor workers are always monitoring the status of the supply network throughout Spain and ensuring that gas always reaches homes. As in the CCAU, the number of workers in Dispatching increases during the winter season.

Nedgia complements emergency telephone support with another space, called Dispatching, also located in the Torre Mare Nostrum

From this command room, Nedgia controls more than 55,000 kilometers of network, through some 3,000 devices distributed throughout the territory that provide almost 120,000 real-time signals, which are analyzed to see if they are correct or not. This allows them to guarantee the continuity, security, and quality of the supply. The system, recently implemented, only issues alerts for those points of the network that are not included in the optimal parameters. When this happens, Nedgia workers analyze the alert and assess its severity. With this technology, which allows remote supervision of emergencies or having real-time information even from remote areas, the effectiveness and efficiency of field operations are ensured.

Before this system existed to analyze the data emitted by the devices, the network supervision work was done manually. This takes us back to before the 90s, when operators went every day to physically place devices at different points of the network that collected information about its status and could not be checked until they went to retrieve it a day later.