Coronavirus Covid-19 Water: Saur on the emergency front line
As France begins its third week of lockdown, ensuring the availability of clean, safe drinking water throughout the country remains a vital priority. Saur is structured to deliver these essential missions at the same time as responding to many emergency situations. In these challenging days, 1,500 of our people are hard at work in all regions of France to ensure 24/7 availability of water supplies.
Service focused on priority missions and emergencies
For the past three weeks, and following implementation of its Business Continuity Plan (BCP), Saur has focused its efforts on producing and supplying drinking water, and providing wastewater treatment services. Non-emergency work, such as meter reading, home visits (to change meters, surveys for new home connections, etc.), and some preventive maintenance tasks where risk levels are low in the short and medium terms, have therefore been postponed.
Alongside this refocusing of its activities, Saur has maintained a 24/7 rapid response force on call to deal with incidents that may impact negatively on this service essential to the everyday life of the French population by keeping its Operations Control Centres (OCCs) on permanent alert.
Broken pipes, leaks, unblocking wastewater drains, electrical and mechanical breakdowns, high-pressure pipeline cleaning at known black spots... Unforeseen operational events come in many shapes and sizes, and Saur has to deal with hundreds of crises - or near-crises - every year. The responsiveness, expertise and professionalism of our teams are permanently available to ensure continuity and - where necessary - restore customer service as quickly as possible.
Operations Control Centre (OCC): monitoring the nation’s water
Thousands of connected sensors and objects installed in our facilities (5,800 reservoirs, 230,000 km of pipeline networks, 5,000 drinking water production plants and wastewater treatment plants, etc.), alarms and analyses transmit real-time data to our eight OCCs covering the whole of France.
Our 130 schedulers - one-third of whom are still working in our OCCs, with the remaining two-thirds working from home during the crisis - allocate responses directly to the schedules of our 1,500 field staff, prioritising emergencies on the basis of operator location and skills.
