Kazza the Blank One

Something EB managed to find.  

The "tour" started with a bunch of us in their conference room and they had a few of the staff there to give a bit of a spiel and answer questions.

Some of my notes:

• For over-heights they get a few a month. But their tunnels are 5.1 which is a bit taller than other Sydney tunnels (M5 east is 4.6 and Cooks River is 4.4). They sometimes get false positives from birds or tarps blowing around.
• They do smoke extraction testing by manually setting a sensor to smoke detection mode and watching to make sure the fans work as expected.
• Heat sensors are often last to pick up any sort of fire. Their incident detection systems will usually get it first - because of a stopped vehicle for example. Then the operators will be looking at the situation before a fire escalates.
• If there's a genuine incident the operators are challenged by having a *lot* of alerts coming up for it.
• Their biggest electricity bill is from operation of the fans. Cars help keep the air flowing, so if there's gridlock, or simply no cars like late at night, then the fans have to work a lot harder.
• They don't generally have any issues with air quality because cars and trucks these days are a lot cleaner.
• They don't have to force feed any fresh air in, except during actual incidents where traffic is backed up.
• They don't do any scrubbing of their exhaust stacks but apparently there's no issues with air quality on the ground because the stacks are quite high and so the pollution doesn't really impact the surrounding area.  They reckon it's actually cleaner on the ground than having a busy road at ground level.
• They regularly publish their air quality sensor reports online.  For example here's some for the M4.
• They have a DR site at homebush, although the two M5 east operators go to a different location for it - the old M5 east control room.
• Fire alerts will go directly to the firies, but operators will still assess any incidents before enacting a fire plan. If a deluge is needed they won't turn it off until the firies give them the go ahead.
• Firie callouts are expensive - something like $1800 each. They had a lot of issues with sensors in the Rozelle tunnels when they first went in - water ingress was setting them off.
• One of their biggest challenges has been integrating all the different tunnel management systems which were built at different times with different systems hardware/software.

Then we got to go see the control room. They have a HUGE screen. Like, it covers the entire western end of the building.  The middle has an overview map of the whole system with colour coded lines and icons to give a quick overview of the status of the system. The top row has up to ten screens they'll use when there's incidents. And the rest just normally have various above ground cameras.

There's six operators 24/7. They mostly look at their own screens rather than the big one. There's four operators for most of the tunnels, and two for the M5 east. They have these metre long curved screens and several other screens which are pretty impressive.

Fascinating day. Oh and they gave us some sandwiches for lunch which was nice!