A brand new high tech control room for Cumbria’s highways operations was unveiled last week.
The new Operational Control Room (OCR) at Cumbria Highways Skirsgill depot in Penrith has cost £50,000 to set up and will revolutionise the way the county’s roads are maintained.
All media were invited to come and see the new OCR in action at Cumbria Highways Skirsgill Depot on December 7.
The OCR is effectively mission control for Cumbria Highways, the partnership between Cumbria County Council, Amey Infrastructure Services and Capita Symonds, and is now the nerve centre for much of the county’s multi-million pound highways operation.
Experts at Amey set up the OCR using experience and skills gained from introducing similar facilities at other Amey local authority and government partnerships.
Staffed around the clock, 365 days a year, the OCR’s state-of-the-art satellite technology and mapping software allows Cumbria Highways to make the most efficient use of millions of pounds worth of resources deployed on the county’s 7,700km road network.
The system allows Cumbria Highways to respond faster and more efficiently to road accidents and civil emergencies as well as to urgent and non-urgent highways issues.
The banks of widescreen monitors in the OCR feature detailed maps of the county showing the exact locations of required repairs and incidents. Satellite technology allows the OCR operators to track highways teams on the ground in real time and despatch the closest emergency team to tackle highways defects that require an urgent response.
The system operators can also programme non-emergency work more efficiently by seeing at a glance which highways team is best placed to tackle which jobs in a day’s work.
Better direction of responsive teams also means that newly created teams will be able to spend more time in each parish of the county working on non-urgent local issues flagged up by parish and town councils, local people and logged by inspections. These teams have already been assigned a rolling work programme which will see them spending three to ten day periods, twice per year in each and every parish.
Whether a fault needing attention is called in to the Highways Hotline by a member of the public, a parish council or is sent in by a highways inspector using a wireless broadband touch-screen tablet, the system flags-up the fault on screen. The operators can then select the most appropriate team for the job at the right time.
Ian Stewart, Cumbria County Council’s cabinet member responsible for highways, said: "The Operational Control Room is very good news for the people of Cumbria because it means that we can now use our resources more efficiently than ever. This technology allows us to see exactly what needs doing, where and when and shows us how to tackle it. That means we can respond more quickly and more efficiently to the urgent issues and the smaller problems and really target our resources to get the most out of them - that is good news for Cumbrian taxpayers."
ENDS
Media enquiries to Justin Hawkins, Media Officer on 01228 606334