[LINK] Canberra Emergency Warnings About Factory Fire

[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

As a follow up that is sure to be of interest to this list, many
documents relating to the incident were released by the government
today: http://www.cmd.act.gov.au/open_government/foi/jacsd/energy_services_invironmental_foi

Of particular interest is the advice and statistical report the
minister received when making the statement about the emergency alert
system mentioned below:
http://www.cmd.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/273998/Documents_2011-17811.pdf
The fire occurred in a light industrial area which as it turns out is
also a good place to put call centers, data centers and VOIP PBXes.
There were 22,000+ landline numbers to call but only 1471 premises.
Somehow 9,000 of these numbers were able to be identified in the
report a week later as invalid numbers "incorrectly identified due to
customer records not being updated".

They also seem to have discovered a maximum throughput of telephone
exchanges, even in the dead of night, of somewhere between 10,000 and
20,000 voice message calls per hour - such that future usage of the
system must be more targeted to those in immediate danger, leaving
others to rely on other channels such as ABC radio.

On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 11:37 AM, Alex (Maxious) Sadleir
<maxious at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 8:24 AM, Tom Worthington
> <tom.worthington at tomw.net.au> wrote:
>>
>> 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
>
> The minister has made a statement on this issue in the assembly:
> https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=1pL-Jak3883rNKr0Bppv6AF400pkA1wQ_XF9W8Gn41iOGg5LlsQvDHVa-lCK_&hl=en
> (pages 12 and 13)
>
>> The template of the voice message requires the originator to submit words in writing spelt phonetically to ensure that words will be pronounced correctly when the system automatically converts text to voice. The phonetic spelling was inadvertently also inserted into the text messages when they were issued.
> [American pronounciation? Primitive system?]
>
>> On preliminary analysis it also appears there were a large number of fixed landline services identified in the target area of the second warning that were not contacted. This was a result of insufficient time being allocated to allow the Emergency Alert System to dial all of the numbers in the target area. The timing allocated is operator defined and future use of Emergency Alert will consider ensuring more time is allowed for a campaign to be completed.