[LINK] Australian Tsunami Awareness Review

Tom Worthington tom.worthington at tomw.net.au
Tue Mar 9 08:21:47 AEDT 2010


The Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, announced a Tsunami Awareness
Project, and a review of the public response to tsunami warnings on 6
March:
<http://www.attorneygeneral.gov.au/www/ministers/mcclelland.nsf/Page/MediaReleases_2010_FirstQuarter_6March2010-TsunamiAwarenessProject>.

Also a "Tsunami Education and Awareness" as CD-ROM and web site is
distributed by Surf Life Saving Australia:
http://beachsafe.org.au/tsunami/>.

These initiatives are of limited value due to a lack of detail about the
review and restrictions placed on distribution of the awareness campaign
materials by the Attorney.

The Attorney says he has written to Emergency Services Ministers and
Surf Life Saving Organisations requesting a review of the public
response to tsunami warnings. It is not clear who is conducting the
review, what resources have been made available for it or when it is to
be completed. The Attorney did not release the proposed terms of
reference for the review.

Australia has a well designed and run Joint Australian Tsunami Warning
Centre (JATWC) provided by the Bureau of Meteorology and Geoscience
Australia: <http://www.bom.gov.au/tsunami/>

However, there is no national system for the warnings to be distributed, 
nor for or response. Warnings are sent to an ad-hoc arrangement of state 
organisations and then to an assortment of local bodies. It is not 
surprising that the public may take little notice of the resulting 
confusing and contradictory messages they get as a result.

An example of the lack of effort for Tsunami warning is show by the
Queensland Government's "Queensland Tsunami Notification Protocol"
(Version 1 , 9 December 2009):
<http://www.disaster.qld.gov.au/publications/pdf/QTNP_Ver_1.pdf>.

This has been distributed as a 9 page 3.7Mbyte PDF document, scanned
from a paper original. As a result the text of the protocol cannot be
found with a search or copied for use in other documents. The protocol
contains such outdated procedures as the JTWC contacting Queensland by
telephone before issuing a Tsunami warning. This is not an acceptable
procedure, as it would delay the issue of a warning and risk public
safety. The protocol assumes a 90 minute warning for a Tsunami. However,
situations can arise much more quickly, which would place emergency
personnel in the dilemma of either following procedures or ignoring them
to issue a timely warning. The Protocol does not specify how agencies
within Queensland are notified. Based on previously experience of a
Tsunami warning in Queensland, it is not clear the Queensland Government
has a system for coordinating a response
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/04/tsunami-warnings-need-to-be-practiced.html>.


Tsunami Education and Awareness Material

The distribution of the awareness material by Surf Life Saving Australia 
will be greatly hampered be the Attorney's decision to ban making 
copies. The Attorney has imposed copyright restrictions on
the material banning the making of any copies without written permission
of the federal government. The Attorney could have instead used a
Creative Commons licence, freely allowing not-for-profit distribution.

Tests on the main menu page of the awareness kit show:

    1. No HTML Validation Errors.
    2. Score of only 35/100 with the W3C mobileOK Checker. It would be
very useful for such a awareness program to be compatible with mobile
phones used by young people.
    3. On an automated accessibility test (TAW 3.0 for WACG 1.0) the
page had zero Priority 1, sixteen Priority 2 and 4 Priority 3 problems.
It would be useful if the page at least met current Australian
guidelines for accessibility of web sites by the disabled.

More at:
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2010/03/australian-tsunami-awareness-review.html>.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/user/3890




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