It was 9am - and Richard Smith's world was centred on Saltaire.

That's despite him living in Ilkley and working in Bradford. But as the duty Operations Manager at Yorkshire Water his state-of-the-art computerised alarm system was telling him all was not well in Saltaire.

The £1 million military-style wall map was flashing heavily. Its blue spot was mushrooming by the minute, reflecting the increasing numbers of incoming calls from angry householders cut off from their water supplies.

By zooming in on the area on the map - right down to individual homes - Richard was able to narrow down the location of the fault on the mains and despatch an engineer.

It was a quiet day and it was easily sorted within the set time limit of five hours without water. Unlike the time when all of Wakefield lost its supply and there were so many calls - around 50,000 - the blue marker blob covered all of Yorkshire.

"That was my darkest day," Richard says. "All the operations managers have them. Luckily they don't happen that often."

Richard is one of six managers who man the centre in Yorkshire Water's Buttershaw HQ, in Halifax Road, round the clock.

There are about 30,000 kilometres of pipes in the region - enough to stretch half way round the world. Many are old, such as the ones built in the 1920s which caused the problem in Saltaire.

But the idea is to make sure their 500,000 customers in the Bradford district get their supplies, clean and uninterrupted from the two major reservoirs in Nidderdale, near Pateley Bridge, which flow into Chellow Heights water treatment plant in Bradford, and from the River Wharfe, near Bolton Abbey - despite the weather.

And that is where the monster map comes in. It helps the frontline engineers to answer all customer complaints as quickly as possible.

Yorkshire Water aims to get a man to the exact location within two hours of receiving a telephone call.

In many cases it's not their problem. A burst pipe inside a house isn't. One woman even rang to tell them she had a crack in the side of her bath. With a big thaw under way across the region, the message is very much to get pipes lagged.

Conservation manager Clare Dunlop said: "Simple measures such as insulating pipework and storage tanks providing heating, or draining down exposed pipes which will not be used for prolonged periods, will help to avoid frost damage."