Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

asked the Minister representing the Attorney-General, upon notice, on 8 November 2011:

In regard to the failure of Emergency Alert in the Mitchell chemical fire in the Australian Capital Territory in September 2011:

(1) When was the department first made aware of the failure of Emergency Alert to function adequately after the Mitchell chemical fire.

(2) Who initially made contact with the department about the failure and when.

(3) What conclusions has the department drawn about the use of Emergency Alert in the Mitchell chemical fire.

(4) Does the Commonwealth issue guidelines to the states and territories for the operation of Emergency Alert; if so, can copies be provided.

(5) Has the Commonwealth issued advisory notices to state and territory emergency services regarding the incident.

(6) With respect to the faulty spelling on the messages, is there a standard suite of 'ready-to-go' messages; if so, why were they not employed in this instance.

(7) Is the department concerned that the emergency services agency of the Australian Capital Territory was under the misconception that the system could send out 170 000 messages in half an hour.

(8) How much training, if any, has the department conducted for state and territory agencies on Emergency Alert and when was this training last conducted.

(9) Why did the Australian Capital Territory Minister for Police and Emergency Services (Mr Corbell) say that he was advised that it would take '6 to 7 hours to reach the target area' of 170 575 landline phone alerts if the system can, according to its website, make 1 000 calls a minute, which would mean less than 3 hours.

(10) Is the Minister aware of any other technologies that can deliver warnings to the same number of people in a shorter period of time; if not, what investigations have been made into such technologies.

(11) Is the department considering reassessing its position on emergency warning, i.e. perhaps looking at sponsoring other emerging technologies.

Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Attorney-General has provided the following answer to the honourable senator's question:

(1) The Attorney-General's Department was made aware of the use of Emergency Alert for the Mitchell Chemical fire through normal monitoring of the media. As officers of the Department live in the vicinity of Mitchell, they also received the warning message on their landline and mobile telephones.

The Emergency Alert technology did not fail; the system was not used in accordance with the Recommended Use Guidelines.

(2) A Departmental officer made initial contact with the ACT Emergency Services Agency on

16 September 2011. The Department provided information about why people may not receive an Emergency Alert message if their details (in the Integrated Public Number Database) are not up to date.

(3) During the Mitchell chemical fire, Emergency Alert delivered over 54,000 SMS warnings and close to 20,000 voice messages to landlines – waking Canberra residents and alerting them to the situation. Without a telephone-based warning capability, emergency services could not have provided immediate and timely advice to so many residents.

Advice from ACT authorities is that the first message was an evacuation warning, sent at 1.38 am to the local Mitchell area advising residents to evacuate immediately. Emergency Alert performed as designed, dialling all 22,598 landline numbers.

The message informed recipients to evacuate the Mitchell area, telling them not to go to either the 'EPIC' (Exhibition Centre) or the racecourse. The message written by the ACT authorities failed to inform the public of where they could go. This text message was not aligned to a message template, a number of examples of which are provided in the National Telephony Warning System Guidelines (Version 1 issued November 2009, Version 1.1 issued August 2011).

The second message issued at 3.19 am, sent a 'watch and act' message advising residents in a wider area to stay indoors. It had an expiry period of 30 minutes and included 86,801 landlines. 30,530 attempts were made in the 30 minutes, equating to a little over 1,000 calls per minute. 13,784 landline calls were answered, with the remainder of the landlines either not dialled because the campaign expired or not answered because they were PABX phones and/or attached to businesses, were busy, or because they were invalid numbers (see below comment on invalid numbers registered to the Crace exchange). Crace is a new suburb of Canberra on the fringe of the inner north, in the same district as Mitchell.

The campaign expired in 30 minutes because the ACT operator did not extend the validity time for the operation of the campaign, in accordance with the landline call volume and system design parameters. The failure to do so meant that there was only sufficient time for a third of the landlines to be dialled.

The 86,801 landlines in the warning polygon drawn by the ACT operator exceeded Emergency Alert's recommend limit of 50,000 calls for a single campaign (as per the Recommended Use Guide) by approximately 73%.

Of the 83,774 mobile phones, over 52,700 text messages were delivered. The remainder either expired (phones not turned on or out of range), or were undelivered (invalid numbers or SMS barring). This means that Emergency Alert was successful in sending the SMS' to all the active mobiles with a service address in the warning campaign polygon.

The data source for Emergency Alert (the Location Based Number Store - LBNS) receives data from the Integrated Public Number Database (IPND). The IPND contains old nine digit numbers. 8,300 of these old nine digit numbers were registered to the Crace telephone exchange's address and so were included in the numbers that Emergency Alert attempted to dial.

Prior to the ACT incident, preliminary work had been undertaken by the Attorney-General's Department, in consultation with the states and territories, to improve the integrity of the data in the LBNS for disconnected numbers. This work is continuing as a priority. The Victorian Department of Justice and the Attorney-General's Department are also progressing other scoped data changes to improve the integrity and filtering of data in the LBNS, including removal of the nine digit numbers.

Before the ACT's use, Telstra analysis indicates that the success rate of delivery of messages to landline phones was approximately 85% (or 70% if the invalid/disconnected numbers are included). Further, before the ACT's use, Telstra analysis indicates that the success rate of messages to available mobile phones appears to be more than 90%. As at 16 November 2011, since it became operational in December 2009, Emergency Alert has been used over 330 times, sending over 7 million messages.

(4) Emergency Alert is operated solely by the states and territories, with Victoria holding the Head Agreement with the service provider, Telstra. The Commonwealth has assisted states and territories to improve their warning capability by funding the development of Emergency Alert.

Primary responsibility for the protection of life, property and the environment rests with the states and territories in their capacity as first responders.

Accordingly, the Commonwealth does not issue guidelines to the state and territory emergency service organisations for the operation of Emergency Alert.

State and territory emergency management agencies have full autonomy in relation to: whether and when to issue an emergency warning; which delivery mechanisms they use to disseminate the emergency warning; and, the content of the warning.

The Victorian Department of Justice has issued a Recommended Use Guide and developed National Telephony Warning System Guidelines in consultation with jurisdictional users of Emergency Alert. The Recommended Use Guide is part of the Emergency Alert Training Manual. It is updated on an ongoing basis, and is available via the Help Tab on Emergency Alert's live environment and training site.

(5) Following the incident, I wrote to both the ACT Minister for Emergency Services, Simon Corbell MLA and the Hon Peter Ryan MP, Victorian Minister for Police and Emergency Services asking them to discuss the lessons learned from the use of Emergency Alert in the chemical fire, at the 11 November 2011 Standing Council on Police and Emergency Management (SCPEM) meeting.

This discussion took place and resulted in all jurisdictions agreeing to partner in further enhancements to Emergency Alert, including looking at ways to improve the integrity of the static data relied on by the system.

(6) Jurisdictions are encouraged to have pre-planned message templates to assist in the timely development and dissemination of warnings. The National Telephony Warning System Guidelines provide examples and guidance. These templates are 'Common Alerting Protocol' compliant.

The ACT Government in its report 'Use of Emergency Alert during the Mitchell Hazardous Material Fire',

16 September 2011, states that the spelling error happened as a result of copying the phonetic spelling prepared for the voice message into the text message (page 5).

In preparing voice messages, Emergency Alert performs an automated text to speech translation and the state/territory emergency service organisation operator is advised to listen to the playback and adjust the spelling accordingly, so the automated voice pronounces words correctly. The Attorney-General's Department understands that the ACT operator undertook this activity, but subsequently 'pasted' the text with the same phonetic changes made to the spelling into the SMS message.

(7) The Attorney-General's Department cannot confirm if the ACT is under that misconception.

The Attorney-General's Department can confirm that Emergency Alert is designed to send 1,000 voice messages and 30,000 SMS per minute.

Analysis undertaken by the Victorian Department of Justice, in consultation with Telstra, indicates that in the significant use of Emergency Alert in Queensland for the 2010-11 floods and Tropical Cyclone Yasi, Emergency Alert performed well above its design parameters. Telstra observed SMS's being sent at over 500 messages/second on some occasions and fixed line calls being made at 900-1,000 calls per minute on average.

(8) As the system is managed and operated by the states and territories, the Attorney-General's Department has not conducted training for the states and territories.

The Department is advised by the Victorian Department of Justice that approximately 60 jurisdictional representatives have attended Telstra's 'Train the Trainer' sessions. These were held in August 2009 and November 2010.

Jurisdictions have full access to a replicated training environment, a comprehensive Training Manual and Recommended Use Guidelines. The Training Manual is accessible from the Emergency Alert user web-site. Emergency Alert is supported by a 24 hour / 7 day a week dedicated Telstra Service Desk.

Since the establishment of Emergency Alert, the Victorian Department of Justice has organised two lessons learned workshops for users of Emergency Alert on 3 March 2010 and 22 March 2011. The Attorney-General's Department understands that the ACT did not attend these workshops.

(9) That is a question for Mr Corbell.

Emergency Alert is designed to send 1,000 voice messages per minute, assuming a 35 second message duration, and a 22 second answer time. At the time of the ACT chemical fire, if the voice message was not answered, the system re-dialled the number twice.

A configuration change to Emergency Alert to limit the number of re-dials to one, was made after the ACT use.

Emergency Alert is limited by existing telephone infrastructure and the capacity of local exchanges. The system has 1,000 dedicated ports, allowing it to dial 1,000 landlines concurrently, providing the local exchange capacity can accommodate this rate. The system sends 30,000 SMS per minute.

(10) The Australian Government has advised the states and territories that it will assist them in enhancing Emergency Alert to enable the delivery of warnings to mobile telephones based on the location of the mobile handset at the time of an emergency. The proposed location-based solution will use network data and is not handset specific.

The countries which have made comparable progress in the development of mass warning capabilities – the United States, Japan and the Netherlands – are all employing telephone-based cell broadcast technology to develop their warning capabilities. This means that their capabilities are handset specific and rely on the voluntary participation of telecommunications carriers. In the United States, authorities do not expect to be able to send emergency warning SMS messages to the majority of citizens for over a decade.

The Council of Australian Governments' decision to prioritise the development of a telephone-based warning capability recognised that most Australians use and have access to landline and mobile telephones and that the percentage of the population who use a mobile telephone continues to increase. Emergency Alert operates across all carrier networks and can send messages to any type of handset.

Australia's decision to invest in a telephone-based warning capability does not mean that other warning technologies, such as radio-based warning mechanisms, will not be explored by the states and territories. The Attorney-General's Department is aware of two emergency warning products which could use radio frequency to turn on a warning device. Both of these products, if adopted by the states and territories, would require households to purchase the individual warning units and ensure that charged batteries are installed.

There is the suggestion that radio signals could be used to remotely switch on mobile telephone and other mobile communication devices. While the concept has potential, currently, a large percentage of these mobile devices do not include a radio chip, meaning many Australians would be unable to receive the alert.

(11) In 2012, the Attorney-General's Department will coordinate a national forum focussing on public warning and communication systems to inform all governments about emerging technologies. State and territory Ministers indicated their support for this forum at the SCPEM meeting on 11 November.

The Department was involved in the development of, and supports the National Emergency Warning System principles, which provide a framework to guide jurisdictional activities in warning the public.