[LINK] Canberra Emergency Warnings About Factory Fire
Tom Worthington
tom.worthington at tomw.net.au
Fri Sep 16 08:24:49 AEST 2011
The ACT Emergency Services Agency issued an emergency warning for
Canberra at 11:52pm 15 September 2011: http://www.esa.act.gov.au/
"Factory fire in Mitchell The ACT Fire Brigade is responding to reports
of a large factory fire in Dacre Street at Mitchell.
Update to follow."
At 4:10pm 16 September 2011, the Emergency Alert system was used to
issue a message to advise "residents within a 10 kilometre radius to
remain indoors until further notice": http://www.emergencyalert.gov.au/
Unfortunately I did not receive the message, although my mobile phone is
registered within the danger zone. The system was last tested, 7 June
2011:
http://www.esa.act.gov.au/ESAWebsite/content_esa/media_page/2011_media_releases/2011___009_esa_to_test_telephone_warning_system.pdf
Media reports indicated that the warning message contained spelling
mistakes and some residents therefore concluded they were a hoax. This
is a serious problem which needs to be investigated after the current
emergency is over. Such messages need to be composed from pre-prepared
and tested templates, not ad-hoc. In 2003 one of my students
investigated what was needed for credible emergency communications:
http://web.archive.org/web/20051024000955/http://www.watersprite.com.au/%7Eshelby/emweb/emweb_final_report.pdf
At 5:09am ACT ESA also commenced using Twitter as @act_esa with text
messages summarizing the more detailed information on the ESA web site:
http://twitter.com/#%21/act_esa
At 6:37am Update 11 reported PCB and Phosgene may in the smoke plume.
But at 6:59am "ACT Fire Brigade have confirmed testing has resulted in
no positive readings for Phosgene to date".
In June I suggested that ACT Emergency Services Agency needed to correct
faults in their web home page. A quick test today shows that these
faults remain:
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/06/national-telephone-warning-system-test.html
There a federal parliamentary inquiry into emergency communication
networks to report in November:
http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/ec_ctte/emergency_communications/index.htm
--
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia http://www.tomw.net.au
Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards
Legislation
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
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