Alert SA

Following the Black Saturday bushfires that occurred in Victoria in February 2009, the Commonwealth Government agreed to work with the States and Territories and fund a National Emergency Alert initiative. 

In April 2009, the Council of Australian Government (COAG) agreed to take immediate steps to enhance Australia's emergency management arrangements through the development of the telephone-based National Emergency Warning System (NEWS) - now known as Emergency Alert or (EA) . EA was developed to enable States and Territories to deliver warnings to landline and mobile telephones based on the service address of the subscriber.  This was implemented in South Australia for the 2009/10 and is still in operation today.

The State Emergency Management Committee (SEMC) has now tasked SAFECOM to develop a multimodal emergency information and warning system for use by all emergency service agencies as identified in the State Emergency Management Plan. As a result SAFECOM  has committed to delivering an all hazards alert system, known as "the Alert SA Solution", to support the Commonwealth funded EA system.

The Alert SA Solution aims to:

• Provide a centralised website to display emergency information from all Emergency Service Agencies.
• Streamline they way Emergency Service Agencies disseminate emergency information via social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook)
• Provide Emergency Service Agencies with the ability to manage inbound telephone requests for emergency information via a virtual call centre capability. The solution also aims to provide recorded information to inbound callers via text to speech conversion technology.

For more information on the Alert SA project, contact: alertsa@sa.gov.au