[LINK] Community Warning Systems, APCO Conference, 3 March 2009

[Richard Chirgwin]

Tom Worthington wrote:
> At 06:02 AM 25/02/2009, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
>   
>> Good one, Tom .. may i suggest that any early warning system MUST be
>> local, reliable and timely. ...
>>     
>
> Reliable yes. How local and timely is needed will depend on the 
> nature of the threat.
>
> As an example for a Pacific wide tsunami alert, "east coast of 
> Australia" is local. For a tsunami you can have hours, but for an 
> earthquake you have less than 20 seconds.
>
> I have to admit that I don't know much about fires, but I would 
> expect warnings are needed in minutes, rather than seconds or hours. 
> Locality to within a kilometer should do, not hundreds of metres or 
> hundreds of kilometers. Cell broadcast should be suitable for this.
>   
In many cases, you get a *reasonable* idea of where a fire is headed
with a longish lead time. If a prevailing wind holds, you might be able
to predict a likely path hours in advance. Locality may well be in the
tens of kilometres; the "in danger" area would depend on the size of the
fire front as well as how fast it's moving and so on.
>   
>> Having our CFA Captains/Cop/Air-Spotters issue specific, LOCAL 
>> warnings would be useful and good ...
>>     
>
> This assumes that you have the resources to detect the threat and 
> issue very localized and timely warnings. There is a danger if you 
> tell everyone they will be warned by phone, they will assume they 
> will receive very specific and timely information they can act on and 
> will sit by the phone waiting to be told what to do.
>   
"Spotter" resources already exist, and already concentrate their data to
the incident controllers. One of the things I find odd in this debate is
that there's an implicit assumption that fires are badly watched
(although I should remember that what I know of NSW may not be true of
other states).

Local warnings are issued by the incident controller, and if I look at
the history of warnings published on the CFA site, they were localised.

As for the "sit by the phone"; I agree, to a point, but then again: up
in Peat's Ridge earlier this year, lots of residents spoke very
favourably about the use of "phone trees" to pass warnings.

Cheers,
RC
> Thanks for the comments, slightly updated draft at: 
> <http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2009/02/community-warning-systems-balancing.html>.
>
>
>
> Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
> Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
> PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
> Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University  
>
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