Every day, natural gas utilities work to provide natural gas service, upgrade infrastructure, manage personnel, train new and existing hires, advocate for improved policies and regulations, and much more.
Emergency response calls make up less than a quarter of the functions a natural gas utility performs every day. But they are always top of mind.
“It’s a critical topic,” said Andrew Lu, managing director, operations and engineering, at the American Gas Association. “When the industry speaks about what’s involved in maintaining public safety, the discussions focus on response times to excavation damages, customer odor calls of a potential leak in or around the home, and other emergency situations.”
Utilities generally measure the time it takes from receiving the call to when a field technician arrives safely on site. A number of companies also track the time it takes to make the location safe, which would include shutting off the gas, if necessary.
According to Lu, utilities have goals for measuring their performance for emergency response. Average response time is a common metric. Another common metric is the percentage of calls responded to within 60 minutes or 30 minutes. Utilities are continually examining ways to whittle down that time, minute by minute.
Response time, however, is a multifaceted issue. Utilities have found that a combination of the right technology, good training, detailed analytics, solid hiring practices and dedicated public awareness programs are making even more rapid response possible.
Much of Michigan is dotted with towns where the population is less than 300, surrounded by wide swaths of rural areas. With 300,000 customers across the state, SEMCO Energy Gas Company isn’t one of Michigan’s largest utilities, and the rural setting offers both pros and cons when it comes to emergency response.
“Geographics actually really help,” said Greg Holmes, director of operations. “There’s not a lot of traffic.”
The utility set a goal of getting response time, in most cases, to under 30 minutes. And when its operations group met with dispatch, it uncovered a communication issue: Dispatch wasn’t always able to get in touch with field technicians. In response, the utility went beyond its traditional approach of attempting to reach personnel by home phone, cellphone and radio. It turned to an old technology based on a dispatcher recommendation: pagers, which could be used successfully in rural areas without cellphone coverage.
Another utility, NiSource, serves more than 4 million customers across seven states under its Columbia Gas and NIPSCO brands. It, too, turned to technology to help provide a solution for its particular challenges. The utility uses a centralized dispatch system—what it calls an integration center—combined with an automated contact system for emergency response.
For NiSource, one of the nation’s largest regulated utilities, a centralized approach offers several benefits. It eliminates the need for smaller and scattered crews of dispatchers across the utility’s territories. Training can be conducted more easily, and on a practical note, there’s greater agility when it comes to backups for vacations or sick leave. There are 300 employees whose sole responsibility is to staff the integration center 24/7 for the planning and dispatch of all work, making this a highly specialized team.
NiSource also a resource-management system to automate the contact information of field technicians nearest to an emergency. The system rings home and mobile phones as well as pagers, and technicians have a short time period to accept or deny the call before the system goes to the next option.
Like SEMCO, however, NiSource turned to an existing technology to help shave off emergency response time. “Another change we are making right now to improve that time is texting field technicians the address of the emergency, so they don’t have to wait for their mobile data terminal to boot up to find the exact location. They receive the text, they have the address and then they use Google Maps so they quickly know where they’re going,” said Kimra Cole, vice president of distribution operations at NiSource. “It’s been a timesaver over the past year since we’ve implemented.”
New York’s Con Edison also uses computer-aided dispatching, along with other mobility solutions such as GPS and estimated time of arrival tools. But one of the most important performance tools it has used in conjunction with the technology is a human one: three-way communication. “I give the order, the field tech repeats it and I confirm it,” said Nicholas Inga, vice president of gas operations. “It minimizes errors and makes sure an employee is getting to the right location.”
With much of the communication occurring over an open radio system, other field technicians who hear the location and who might be able to get there more quickly will often speak up. “They’ll raise their hand and say, ‘I’ll take that; I’m just around the corner,” Inga said. “It happens frequently. It takes a lot of teamwork to make all of this happen.”
That kind of attitude is encouraged with ongoing training and communication. “About four or five years ago, we tried to really concentrate on lowering our times, and part of that was communication with the employees. Our employees really have a great sense for the public safety end of it; they were very concerned and wanted to get there as quickly and safely as possible,” said SEMCO’s Holmes. “We actually improved by a minute or two just by reviewing with employees and getting them involved with the whole process. I think that really helped with the buy-in.”
At NiSource, along with technology, culture and process were two key areas where the utility performed a deep dive to improve response time. Employee engagement, said Cole, helped change the way employees at all levels thought about emergency response. “We made sure it was very understood that this is important, and everyone in the company was willing to make adjustments to get better,” she said.
The utility went back to the basics, making sure employees and other partners, both internal and external, understood their roles and responsibilities—“and who does what during an emergency.” It installed a dispatching training lab and also improved field training.
But even while the utility has created that sense of urgency when getting out the door, it has also instilled an awareness of safety. “If we get into a wreck, then we’re not doing anybody any good,” said Cole.
At Con Edison, leadership took a closer look at hiring practices. Field technicians now must come in with trade or other related experience, such as plumbing. New hires also shadow seasoned employees for a time until they are ready to be on their own. “That proved to be beneficial to getting folks up to speed quickly and ready to be emergency responders,” said Inga.
Putting people in the right place also makes a difference. Con Edison runs a 24/7 operation and has instituted a system of overlapping shifts to ensure constant coverage. “On any given day, we have people starting at 6, 7 and 8 a.m. … which helps us not get caught short during a shift turnover and helps us deal with the changing volume of work based on history,” he said.
When SEMCO began taking a hard look at its response times, its focus was on the over 30-minute and over 45-minute response time exception reports. Today, it continues to review any case in which response time is over 30 minutes to help determine what happened and if any process improvements could be made.
Its research found that 60 percent of calls happen during the day, and there’s about a 10 percent upswing in emergency calls in the coldest months of the year, January and February, so SEMCO staffs differently during those times based on the data.
NiSource conducts root cause investigations on any emergency that takes more than 45 minutes from the time a customer calls to when a field technician arrives on the premises. One outcome of these investigations was a new look at staffing locations and placing field technicians where data indicated emergencies were more likely to occur. The utility is also looking closely at the data to try to determine why repeat calls are coming from the same locations. “This is a never-ending continuous improvement loop,” said Cole.
In addition, Con Edison uses data analytics to examine call history so it can better place responders, based on time of day, population density and location trends. At the same time, it’s aggressively investing in main replacement and conducting 13 annual leak surveys, even though only one is required under state regulations. “It’s all part of the focus we have and our operating strategy, which is to prevent, detect and respond,” said Inga.
Con Edison has received an increasing number of gas emergency calls over the last several years. It credits that to its ongoing public awareness campaigns, including its most recent “Smell Gas. Act Fast.” campaign, which it has promoted through traditional and online media. New York subways featured the ads, and gas safety videos, including some in foreign languages, are available to customers via Con Edison’s website.
SEMCO’s public awareness campaigns take the form of bill inserts, school programs and traditional media, but the utility also conducts personal outreach to first responders, thanks to a dedicated two-person staff whose role is to travel throughout the state to meet face-to-face with first responders and reinforce how they and the utility can work together on gas emergency calls.
NiSource conducts a traditional public awareness campaign, too, focused both on what to do if a customer smells natural gas and why customers should call 811 before digging. And if a line is damaged, the company goes back to that root cause analysis: The utility examines what caused the damage and how it could have been prevented. The approach has netted results. “Over the past five years, we have lowered the number of damages per thousand year over year,” said Cole.
“[After all], so much of this issue also involves communication with and education of the homeowners and excavators,” said AGA’s Lu. “The industry’s goal is to share what natural gas is all about, including what to do if you suspect that you smell a gas odor.”
Keeping customers and communities safe “is the most important thing we can do,” added NiSource’s Cole. “We took a hard look at this with the understanding that we have a true opportunity to keep getting better at responding to emergencies.”
“Natural gas emergency response” is a broad term that’s commonly used to include situations where customers or third-party excavators are calling in odor complaints or cut gas lines. But according to a recent survey conducted by the American Gas Association, emergency response calls at natural gas utilities may cover a variety of situations, including: