The practice of dealing with disaster

27 Aug 2010

By the time cyclone season comes around again, it’ll be too late to wonder how the country’s emergency comms procedures will hold up. To stave off disaster, we recently took part in a Darwin practice exercise.

It is widely understood that radio broadcasts—particularly those of the national broadcasting services—have a critical role to play in the event of an emergency or natural disaster. For most families, over-the-air announcements are a vital source of information that could mean the difference between life or death.

As a result, the Australian Government and radio communications industry is taking this role very seriously, and has initiated a series of 'Communications Desktop Exercises' in several states to help streamline emergency responses. Hosted by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, the most recent exercise was held in Darwin on 4 August, and was attended by multiple representatives of the broadcast and communications sector, including Broadcast Australia.

Establishing procedures

According to Nick Watts, Broadcast Australia's Regional Manager for the West Region (NT, WA and SA), the objective of these exercises is to practice the communication between parties and raise awareness among participants. "It's invaluable to get everyone together to establish procedures," he said. "Each group has specific roles and responsibilities, but we need to make sure that we're all able to work together in a crisis."

Three scenarios were worked through during the Darwin exercise, which maintained a live videoconferencing link to a parallel event in Sydney. Divided into three groups, the participants first looked at 'preparing for a cyclone', followed by 'dealing with damaged communications infrastructure', ending with 'dealing with loss of power'.

"It's critical to establish how we're going to deal with issues like shared infrastructure—such as if there's only one emergency generator," Nick said. "After all, we don't want to rob Peter to pay Paul!"

Out of the ordinary

As the company responsible for broadcasting national radio services, Broadcast Australia needs to ensure we can deliver the signal when and where needed. If one of our six Northern Territory AM radio (medium-frequency) transmission sites goes down, one alternative is to patch the feed through to one of three high-frequency facilities near Katherine, Alice Springs or Tennant Creek. Our Network Operations Centre (NOC) also plays a central coordination role.

"The Darwin event went exceptionally well and achieved its objective in helping to build relationships between key organisations," said Nick. "It highlighted that we don't need to change anything that we'd ordinarily do in these situations—and helped set the framework for what to do when it gets out of the ordinary."

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