February 5, 2013
The South Burnett Regional Council will re-examine its communications strategy as part of a review of how it handled the Australia Day weekend floods when the region’s Disaster Management Committee is debriefed on Friday, Mayor Wayne Kratzmann said today.
In particular, the Council will look at ways it can continue to improve communications with Shire residents in future emergencies.
This includes exploring possible new strategies, such as developing “local champions” who could be relied on to contact their neighbours if phoned from a central call centre during a disaster.
Council will also consider what it could do in the event of another total systems failure, such as the one that occurred on January 28 when large parts of the South Burnett were left without Internet, landline and mobile phone services for almost eight hours after a Telstra cable failed at Harlin.
Although the problem was fixed when repair crews arrived at the site by truck through floodwaters, the outage left many South Burnett residents unable to ring “000” or contact emergency services by phone or email.
Mayor Kratzmann said he knew existing systems “weren’t perfect” and he was keen to examine ways they could be improved.
Under the Disaster Management Act 2003, the SBRC acts as the lead authority in disaster situations, co-ordinating the response to emergencies.
During the latest emergency, the Council used its website, Facebook, radio and direct telephone calls to manage information dissemination with residents.
But the fact Council staff were deluged with thousands of telephone calls is proof there is still room for improvement.
southburnett.com.au estimates 7 per cent of the Shire’s population signed on to Council’s Facebook feed but most were unable to access it at all when the Telstra outage occurred.
In the case of radio, residents in some parts of the Shire had difficulty tuning into the stations or – in the ABC’s case – finding South Burnett news updates amongst that network’s extensive coverage of the unfolding disasters occurring in Bundaberg, Gympie and the North Burnett.
“When the 2011 floods happened most people looked on them as a one-in-100 year event,” Mayor Kratzmann said.
“After the Australia Day weekend I think many people are changing that view. But now that the worst is hopefully behind us, we need to look at what we’re doing to see if we can improve on things.”
