[LINK] Canberra Emergency Warnings About Factory Fire

[Fred Pilcher]

We got the landline call. My wife answered it half-asleep - she said 
that the messages started before she could get the phone to her ear. In 
her somnolent state she didn't really take it in - it would have been 
very helpful if they'd repeated the message. It advised us to contact 
Canberra Connect for further information, which we did, to get the 
after-hours message with options such as "If your query is about garbage 
collection, press one, etc." There was no information about the fire.

We turned on the local ABC radio station, but it was just the normal 
early morning program - there was nothing about the situation. After all 
that we assumed it was a hoax and went back to sleep.

Then, about an hour later, we got an SMS from our daughter, *who's in 
France*, saying "Big chemical fire in Mitchell - stay inside, keep the 
windows and doors closed!"

We have two mobile phones, one with Optus and one with TransACT, neither 
of which received the "official" SMS. Had we received it, the spelling 
errors would have screamed "hoax".

All in all, a pretty lacklustre performance.

Fred