Victoria Fires Report Offers Suggestions; Reporter Harps on LBS

The report about last summer’s fires and the resulting deaths in Victoria, Australia came out yesterday. It includes many suggestions for future responses. (The Austrlalian)

But in an interview with Sky News Attorney-General Robert McClelland concedes that an LBS app to alert those in the line of fire is still far off. Sky News (I belive it’s David Speers) is relentless in his questioning (Australia.to):

SPEERS:      One of those areas for the Commonwealth Government is the idea of an early phone alert system. Now is this system going to be in place in time for the coming summer?
McCLELLAND:              It will be switched on for trial in October, we’re told and operational in November. At this stage it will, however, only be to billing addresses and households. It won’t target the location of people where they actually are on their mobile phone.
SPEERS:      Is that because of technology?
McCLELLAND:              This is because of technology.
We’re contributing to research to develop this capability in Australia. But at this stage, it will still be to billing addresses. A big advance, but not perfectly there yet.
SPEERS:      So, for people who might be visiting fire prone areas, or danger areas, they’re not going to receive any sort of alert on their mobile phone?
McCLELLAND:              If they live outside the area, or their billing address is their place of work, they won’t receive a targeted warning. I think there will be compensation for that by making the alerts more general this fire season, so that we can cover as wide an audience as possible. But that’s still important work we’re doing.
SPEERS:      And you don’t know how far off that might be, that location based alert?
McCLELLAND:              The Victorian Government is in charge of calling for a Request for Information from the market – I think it’s called, the technical phrase – as to who may be capable of providing that service. So we’re waiting to see what comes in, in the next few weeks.

It’s something to see a reporter advocate for geotechnology so aggressively.