The below message was sent by Neighbouorhood Watch Scotland
The following important message has been circulated on behalf of SGN We know that during the coronavirus outbreak, you’ll rely on us now more than ever to keep you and your family safe and warm. Your safety, and the safety of our employees, will remain our number one priority in the weeks and months ahead. We will continue to operate the 24/7 National Gas Emergency Service across the south of England and in Scotland during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our engineers will continue to attend properties and make the situation safe, as always. We have extra safety precautions in place to make sure you and our colleagues are protected from catching or spreading the virus. Changes to our ways of working Following the latest Government advice on 23 March to stay at home, we must make changes to our usual ways of working. From Tuesday 24 March, we are only continuing with safety-critical and emergency work. This means we’ll temporarily suspend our planned connections, metering, gas mains replacement and gas holder dismantling projects. Over the coming days, we’ll wind down all aspects of these activities in a controlled way to ensure people and sites are safe, and our network is secure. Protecting our customers and our colleagues If you need us in an emergency, we are still here for you. However, if we need to visit your home, we’ll ask you some extra questions: Is there anyone in your property with a confirmed case of coronavirus? Are you or anyone else in the property in self-isolation on medical advice or following contact with someone who has the virus? We’ll still come out to you if you answer ‘yes’ to either of these questions. With this in mind, we’ll ask you to help us keep our colleagues safe by following these extra steps: Asking everyone in the property to stay in a separate room from our engineer while they work – this should be a room without any gas appliances or the gas meter Opening all the windows in the room where our engineer will be working Our engineers will wear protective equipment, including gloves and a mask, but please don’t be alarmed. We’re committed to keeping our key workers safe, as well as the families we visit, as we respond to gas emergencies. We’ll continue to follow all Government and public health advice on precautionary measures to reduce the risk for our people and our customers, including providing colleagues with guidance on social distancing as well as additional personal protective equipment. We’ve also split key business-critical teams across multiple locations to make sure we protect the essential service they provide. Our plans We’re doing all we can to make sure we can continue to keep the gas flowing to homes and businesses during the coronavirus outbreak. Our dedicated Pandemic Working Group was set up at the start of February to lead our response to COVID-19, which has the full support of our Executive team. We have extensive business continuity plans in place, which have been implemented now. This includes ensuring as many of our support teams as possible are able to switch to working from home. As the pandemic progresses and Government advice evolves, we may need to adapt the ways we work even more. We will keep our website page https://www.sgn.co.uk/coronavirus updated with details of any further changes to our usual services. For more information about how we’re working together with the UK’s other gas and electricity networks to keep your energy flowing during coronavirus, visit the Energy Networks Association’s website. Thank you. |