Sydney's Emergency Warning System

What does Sydneys emergency warning system actually do? Who does it warn and what does it warn them of?

Apparently no-one and nothing! And many people didn't hear it when it was trialled anyway.

MrT.

It's a public address loudspeaker and signage system for the Sydney CBD. It uses around 100 speakers mounted on traffic light poles, and about a dozen message boards.

It was put in for the APEC summit in 2007 amid fanfare, and has been promoted as primarily for terrorist attacks, but is of course of more use for emergencies and natural disasters etc. Never been used, but it gets tested every now and then (supposed to be monthly) and famously has plenty of failures and problems.

Arguably not a huge amount of use during a blackout, but it highlighted that it has no battery backup. Instead of using what speakers were still working, they decided to use the SMS alert system instead, but that took them 40 minutes before they sent something. The SMS system is primarily to inform building managers etc.

Dave.

"The building you are currently situated in, went under a blackout condition approximately 40 minutes ago. We hope you found this message useful. This message was brought to you by the phone network carriers who were thoughtful enough to power backup their equipment."

Drunken Bogans

I guess you never had a contract for government/public service and tried communicate with their engineers...

Tom

wow, that is really bad. I always found the engineers to be clueie, but the managers/accountants/legalites out of it.

The 'engineers' don't work for the goverment, they might work in the engineering department, and there job title might be 'design engineer' but they aren't engineers. The government comes up with ideas by itself without consulting engineers etc. and then outsources the projects. Which is why so much stuff is unbelievably useless, and anything that isn't is because its run be a seperate goverment 'company'.

I don't know who they are... spoke to one PLC "expert" who never heard of RS-485. Department of Commerce, apparently they doing technical work for small organizations without technical expertise, like councils. Anyway, after a while we have received a spec for the project. Same day a phone call from another company involved in the project, they proposed to get together and work out between us what we'll do so we can up with something that works. Apparently they don't understand much from the spec, nor do we but at least we both know what the government wants to achieve.

Tom

Many government departments employ a number of people with Engineering degrees, some with great experience. Unfortunately these people are rarely listened to by the people in charge.

(And many so called "engineers" who work for private industry have no real qualifications and even less ability in some cases.)

MrT.

Yep.

Don't look too closely at your local council.