WJ Group has installed a new dedicated control centre to help monitor CCTV across road works sites nationwide.
Monitoring security camera systems overlooking road works is a critical task that ensures incidents are dealt with quickly and helps keep the network moving. Although a necessary safety precaution, it is an expensive and time-consuming process to install individual control rooms as well as recruiting and training staff to monitor the cameras.
To help highways authorities and principal contractors ensure safety at works sites, WJ Group’s new control room will be connected to every CCTV camera system that it operates across the country. Moreover, third party systems can also be monitored to ensure worker and public safety.
Following continued constraints on maintenance budgets, the additional costs of installing and maintaining around-the-clock monitoring can be significant, especially in situations where only a few systems are required.
Housed at WJ Group’s depot in Stoke-on-Trent, the Control Centre negates the need for these additional costs. It is managed and operated by a highly trained monitoring and analysis team, offering continuous support throughout the year, with the potential to monitor up to 20 different schemes at any one time.
Tom Howarth, ITS Manager at WJ Group explained: “Traditionally when working on a specific scheme, the contractor or highways authority would host a Control Centre to monitor all the ongoing activity occurring at sites, even if it was for a single location. We know from working with our partners that installing, organising and manning this can be expensive and time consuming, so to help mitigate the issue, we opted to expand our offering to include this alongside providing the CCTV cameras.”
Tom said: “Our goal is for the control centre to not only be used for identifying stranded vehicles but monitoring more generally the road work process. We see our operatives in the control centre as being traffic management experts and understanding how traffic management works and helping the site teams get traffic through the road works as safely as possible.
“We want to work with highways maintenance departments, principal contractors and our other partners to relieve their stress and issues resulting in better road works and safety for the general public. With our expert team keeping a watchful eye on the sites, authorities can redistribute their resources to deliver other pressing matters, allowing for a more efficient operation.”
