No more delay with national SMS alert system
Given the extreme conditions that Australians have had to face over the last two months; it seems almost unfair to now be told that the likelihood of severe earthquakes literally shaking the country is quite high. Following the initial bushfire disasters earlier this year, the need for an emergency SMS notification system could not be more apparent.
There have been attempts by Victoria’s Emergency Fire Services to use text messaging to warn residents of approaching bushfires. Not part of an official emergency system, these Bushfire SMS messages were sent using commercial services. The response to the text messages was mostly positive, said the Emergency Services Commissioner in Victoria, Bruce Esplin. He goes on to say that the need for a complex national warning system is clear.
Add to this the text messages that were sent out in early February by the Health Department trying to warn elderly people about taking precautions during Adelaide’s heat wave, the most severe one experienced since 1908. Some of these messages were received as far north as Darwin and by people who were not vulnerable to heat. There have been complaints by South Australia opposition party MP, Stephen Wade saying that this was “…a half-baked and knee-jerk response” to the crisis. Clearly the national SMS alert system needs to be fully integrated, able to cross a range of network providers and be affiliated it to a stable and trusted SMS Gateway system.
Coming back to the earthquake scenario, experts point out that ‘Australians are “complacent” to the risks posed by earthquakes and that one could strike a major city at any time. The recent moderate earthquakes experienced in the Gippsland town of Korumburra in southeast Victoria could be felt over 120km away in Melbourne. These are not the first quakes to hit this region this year – a smaller one was felt in January and seismologist Cove Colins of Geoscience Australia says that similar or larger earthquakes could strike more populated areas in the future. In 1989, the magnitude 5.6 earthquake that hit Newcastle killed 13 people and caused more than AU$1 billion worth of damage.
Most Australian cities are near earthquake prone areas, says Dr Keven McCue of Central Queensland University. The problem is that most infrastructure, including buildings and roads, in Australia is not designed to cope with earthquakes on this scale and if they struck within major cities it would be a major disaster. Because Australia’s history of recording earthquakes only goes back 130 years, the data on which civil engineers and builders operate could be misleading.
It is clear that a national SMS emergency system is an imperative for Australia. It needs to be integrated allowing cross communication between fire, health, police, government and other emergency services. It needs to involve incident and damage assessment capabilities, allow for the mobilization of rescue workers and the transmission of emergency instructions. All of these factors plus the ability to manage evacuations efficiently rely on horizontal and top-down communication ability.
It needs to be done through a stable SMS Gateway provider that can connect to a multitude of mobile network providers and deliver messages to any device. The SMS Gateway provider needs to offer escalation of emergency text messages – that if the critical message is not immediately acknowledged it will be escalated to the next available communication channel until message delivery is assured. Text messages need to be sent securely with encryption if need be. And all text message traffic needs to be traceable and auditable for post incident analysis. A national emergency SMS alert system could save time and therefore lives in the event of another spate of runaway bushfires, extreme weather events or even earthquakes.
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