Page 4030 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 20 September 2011
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The first text message advised:
Emergency. Emergency. The ACT Fire Brigade is responding to a Chemical insadent in Mitchell. Resadents are advised to evacuate the suburb immediately.
A second emergency alert was issued at approximately 3.20 am to people with registered billing addresses for mobile and landline telephones within the suburbs of Franklin, Crace, Harrison, Watson, Downer, Kaleen, Lyneham and Hackett. The second voice message advised:
The ACT Fire Brigade is responding to a chemical incident in Mitchell. Residents of Franklin, Crace, Harrison, Watson, Downer, Kaleen, Lyneham, Hackett are advised to shelter indoors, immediately. If you are indoors, close all windows, doors, vents and turn off, air conditioning. Further information is available via Canberra Connect, or go www.esa.act.gov.au.
The second text message advised:
The ACT Fire Brigade responding to chemical insadent in Mitchell. Resadents of Franklin, Crace, Harrison, Watson, Downer, Kaleen, Lyneham, Hackett stay indoors.
There has been some criticism levelled at the ESA regarding the ambiguity of the messages issued. I am aware there were spelling errors in both messages issued via SMS and it is regrettable that this led to uncertainty regarding the origin and authenticity of the messages to some people.
The emergency alert system issues warnings via voice recording and SMS, based on predefined templates for a particular emergency. 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.
On preliminary advice, 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 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. The challenge associated with this is that the dialling of landline and mobile numbers in a large area could take many hours to complete successfully. This obviously has an impact on the capacity to issue alerts in a timely manner.
Despite this, these factors should not detract from the initial success of emergency alert. The wording and issue of any future alerts using the emergency alert system will be critically examined as part of the ESA’s after-action review for this incident.
Further information was also provided to the community through the use of social media such as Twitter, which saw a substantial growth in the number of followers of
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