A REPORT into the national emergency alert telephone warnings during the recent Mitchell chemical fire has highlighted limitations in the system.

Minister for Police and Emergency Services Simon Corbell, who released the report today, said he would be writing to the Federal Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, to raise the issue of the system’s limitations and will also raise the issue at the Standing Council on Police and Emergency Management in November.

On the day of the fire on September 16, the first emergency alert message was sent at 1.38am, targeted to Mitchell advising of the fire and the implementation of an exclusion zone.

However the second message, sent at 3.19am advising people within the 10km zone, did not reach all intended.

“This is because it would have taken six to seven hours for the system to deliver the message to all phones within the zone,” Mr Corbell said.

“The ACT ESA has advised that emergency alert will be best used in the future for sending targeted messages to small areas rather than for large scale use as was done on 16 September where time is a critical factor.”

Five recommendations were made in the report around additional training, review of procedures including quality assurance processes, better utilisation of system functionalities within limitations and provide written advice to the system administrators and national governance bodies about the ACT experience with recommended enhancements.

“The report reinforces that emergency alert is just one of many options available to emergency controllers to issue community warnings and is not always suitable for use in all circumstances,” he said.

“The more traditional methods, through local media outlets and the ESA website, and the newly utilised ESA Twitter account, proved extremely successful during the Mitchell chemical fire.

“The ESA issued 37 alerts and updates via ESA website and through local media outlets between Friday 16 September and Sunday 18 September on the fire.

“During this time the website recorded 64,963 visits with a total of 127, 285 page views.

“The ESA also posted 107 tweets on the ESA Twitter account @ACT_ESA and has gone from having 15 followers to over 1900.”

ACT Liberals spokesperson for emergency services, Brendan Smyth said the report shows ACT Labor has learnt nothing from its catastrophic handling of past emergencies such as the 2003 bushfires.

“The ACT’s emergency management system is in disarray,”  he said.

“Emergency alerts did not even reach the necessary ten per cent of Canberra’s population during what could have been a potentially life-threatening situation.

“Instead of taking full responsibility for this failure, Simon Corbell suggested Canberrans should have listened to local radio instead of relying on the emergency alerts. This is completely unrealistic and irresponsible, given the fire occurred at around midnight.

“Simon Corbell clearly doesn’t take his role in protecting Canberrans from potentially dangerous situations seriously.”