It is midday on Wednesday when the NSW State Emergency Service Headquarters clocks up the 9677th call-out resulting from the 2½ days of near-relentless rain and wind that has battered the NSW coast.
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The state HQ is spread across six floors of a building in Regent Street, Wollongong.
Its operation room is normally empty but since Monday it has served as the nerve centre of the NSW storm response, its wall of television screens flicked into frenetic life and its rows of seating populated by experts.
The screens show numbers, maps, symbols - red triangles for the places of major flooding; yellow for moderate; green for minor.
The people sitting opposite have been drawn from different parts of the organisation for their expertise in logistics, flood intelligence, support and planning.
They make maps based on up-to-the-minute weather information; they move volunteers between the SES's 235 units, and arrange their accommodation and transport.
There is an adjoining media room where NSW SES Deputy Commissioner Steven Pearce often stands before a single camera that feeds to television stations across the country.
"Today we have over a thousand emergency service workers out in the field," he will tell the cameras, at a media conference two hours later.
"We're concentrating our efforts back up into the Hunter to try and assist with the recovery and the clean-up of ... floods that we've never seen the likes of before. A lot of these towns have received the largest ... rainfall ever in recorded history.
"The winds that impacted these areas ... are akin to a cyclone of category two 130km/h, so you can just see how challenging this event is."
On another level, the call centre is manned by its usual six blue-uniformed SES staff as well as pods of more than 20 others dressed in mufti - trained operators called in to help with the extra workload.
Soon someone will pick up the 10,000th call for help.
