What are hazard calls?
Hazard calls are calls to an electricity, gas or water network that report an immediate danger to people or property. They are sometimes called safety calls, emergency calls or danger calls. Common examples include:
- fallen, low-hanging or clashing power lines
- sparks, flashes, smoke or fire from poles, lines, transformers or substations
- a vehicle that has hit a pole, especially with people inside
- damaged or leaning poles
- exposed underground cables or damaged street boxes
- a smell of gas, or damage to a gas meter or pipe
- a person or animal in contact with electrical equipment
On most fault lines, hazard calls are a small share of total volume, but they carry by far the highest consequences.
Why hazard calls need special handling
The difficulty with hazard calls is that they arrive mixed in with everything else. In a storm, a contact centre may receive thousands of calls about loss of power. A few of those will be about a live line across a driveway. If all calls wait in one queue, the most urgent calls wait as long as the least urgent, and in a call avalanche that wait can be very long.
Callers don’t always say clearly that they have a safety concern either. Someone ringing to say “the power’s off” may only mention the line on their lawn when asked. That is why fault triage puts the safety questions first.
How utilities prioritise hazard calls
Getting them out of the queue
- An emergency option at the start of the call. A short IVR or AI voice assistant prompt lets callers with a safety risk bypass the outage queue.
- Automatic detection. Speech recognition and sentiment analysis can flag urgent words such as “sparks”, “fire” or “line down” and route the call to a person.
- Deflecting routine calls. Every outage call answered by automation or proactive notification shortens the wait for those who need an agent.
Handling the call
- Safety advice first. Tell the caller to keep well clear, keep others away and treat equipment as live. If anyone is in danger, they should ring 111 (NZ) or 000 (Australia).
- Exact location. Street address, nearest pole number if visible, landmarks and which side of the road.
- What they can see and hear. In the caller’s own words.
- Immediate escalation. Pass the job to the control room or field crew dispatch using an agreed urgent path, not the standard job queue.
- Callback details. So the crew can contact the caller if they need directions.
Good practice
- Script it and make it unmissable. Use call scripting so safety questions are asked on every call, by every agent, including surge agents on their first shift.
- Agree escalation rules in advance with the network’s control room, including what agents can do without supervisor approval.
- Design the AI handover. Make sure the AI-to-human handover passes the full context, so the caller doesn’t have to repeat themselves.
- Test the emergency path under load before storm season.
- Review every major event to check that hazard calls were identified and escalated quickly.