Reporting of the NSW fires in the past few days has included eyewitness accounts from homeowners under direct threat who recall being warned by helicopter sirens.
Is the use of the siren increasing?
Is there a policy on use of sirens as a warning?
I’m all for it, but as usual, the public are not well informed.
What are the public meant to do when a helicopter sounds a siren? Shelter or flee?
In a submission to the Black Saturday Royal Commission I called for helicopters to fly well ahead of a fire front and use sirens to warn communities. Not necessarily to direct them, but initially just to wake them up.
But the introduction of the emergency warning message system, which uses mobile phone and landlines, I thought would provide this advance warning.
But the town of Paradise California, destroyed by wildfire on Nov 8th 2018, showed the shortcomings of an early warning system delivered by a commercial telecommunications network. The majority of emergency warning messages were not received. In some areas, the failure rate was 95%.
The fire started at 6.50 am and impacted the town an hour later. Paradise was a nice spot to retire so many residents were not too active at 8 am.
Paradise had become reliant on wireless delivery for voice and broadband. The trusty, fire resilient, copper landline has been marginalised. Seven wireless towers were knocked out simultaneously.
Fibre optic is not ubiquitous in rural areas due to the cost of rollout.
Australia has gone the same way. 80-85% of premises in NBN fixed wireless zones (rural areas) have disconnected their copper land line. At the time the Royal Commission published its report, it was forecast that the majority of premises in rural areas would maintain a landline, but the opposite has occurred. The LNP favoured more wireless and less landlines in rural areas.
Communications failure was not on the radar so government policy was based on the network being as resilient in the future as it had been in the past. The center piece of reform generated by the Royal Commission was the emergency warning system. Australia led the world in its activation, but it relies on a reliable comms network for distribution.
VoIP presents an additional hurdle to identify and prioritise callers.
To make matters worse, since 2016, mobile phone carriers have been encouraged to install antennas on NBN towers. This often occurs in high risk bushfire areas where mobile phone blackspot funding has subsidised the telco. The unintended consequence is that a community receives mobile phone, VoIP and internet service from a single tower. The landline is usually disconnected due to the additional $55 per month cost of keeping it active.
Most of the public are unaware of this reliance on a single tower.
You can identify a nbn monopole tower as it has a circular gantry. If it also has a set of antennas located below the gantry then it is one of these co-located towers which is a particularly critical piece of infrastructure.
In the Macedon Ranges, in Victoria, approx 7 of the 14 NBN towers are planned to have mobile phone equipment attached. Endurance of backup batteries under heavy use is only 3 hours.
There is no legal requirement for towers to have permanent generators, two of the mobile phone towers atop the strategic location of Mount Macedon, do not have permanent generators.
There are no bushfire related studies into this rapid change to wireless.
The politicisation of the NBN has had a chilling effect on research and reporting.
So, based on Paradise and the NBN network, the use of helicopters as an early warning tool in Australian rural areas should be given more weight in the public warning strategies of emergency management.
A turbine and siren screaming overhead or a “ping” from your phone on the bedside table?
Which is the effective wake-up call?
On the 10th anniversary of Black Saturday, Australia’s two top fire scientists wrote that the nation had become complacent to the threat of bushfires.
Last week the Governor of California called for more resilience in telco infrastructure, Australia lacks this kind of leadership.
Love to hear your experiences on how the public react to skyshout. when under threat of bushfire.
Mjb