East Gippsland Water (EGW) operates a water supply service for the Lakes Entrance area. Sometime during the night of 19th December, the water control management system became unavailable. Early morning on the 20th December, EGW advised Parasyn’s on-call team that they believed Mt Taylor Repeater had suffered a major lightning strike and that communications appeared to be unavailable to operate the water system.

Parasyn’s on call team were requested to be available to restore the service as soon as possible.

By mid-morning, EGW advised Parasyn that the issue was far more serious. The 30 metre Communications Tower had fallen down during an overnight storm. On closer examination, the tower anchors had been removed by vandal’s. Due to the damage, it was unlikely that communications would be restored soon.

In order to restore the management of the water supply, EGW needed to replace the existing communications with an alternative communications. This meant that the SCADA network, control and communications configuration would need changing urgently to restore the water management system service. Parasyn’s on call engineers leveraged their existing dual communications configuration and applied it to affected sites. Not only was the service restored and fully operational before the end of the day, but the restoration was a permanent resolution providing EGW with acceptable risk mitigation for future events and higher system availability.

Working together with EGW operational staff, Parasyn engineers value the trust and responsibility of being part of the team that keeps critical infrastructure operational 24/7.