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Fire Warning… Text???

Victoria is obviously still in shock after the fires that occured just a few weeks ago. However, is it really right for the CFA/Victoria Police to be scaring the hell out of residents accross the state by sending a SMS to all Victorian residents telling them that extremely dangerous weather is afoot. Now, it appears it was, and the winds seen yesterday where damn strong and did a fair bit of damage. However, was there really the need to freak people out by sending them this text message? IMHO, hells no. All this message did was make people get even more hyped up than they already where. ABC reported calls from people saying they had either not received the message and also calls from people yesterday saying that they had stayed home from work to protect their properties when it simply was uneccesary ( Source - http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/03/2505706.htm ).

Yes the winds where bad, and yes it did appear that it was going to be a very bad day, but the agencies involved need to find a healthy mid-ground between having people caught unawares and scaring people that need not be concerned. The fact is that those who needed to be immediatly concerned would have already been paying attention to either ABC radio or would have been to a fire meeting regarding already active fires in their area. New fires that started yesterday had the potential to be nasty but there is always the potential for bad fires and those that live in such areas are most likely people in country areas that are already aware of approaching severe weather events through radio/TV services and also through friends and by... Oh... Looking out the window.

I understand that both the CFA and Victoria Police do not want a repeat of the deaths seen a few weekends ago but they need to find a healthy medium, not to mention they need to properly implement a system. SMS messages are notoriously unreliable, and many people didn't receive them at all. Not to mention there is the whole crying wolf aspect to this thing. I hate to say it but the CFA has been crying wolf for a while both internally and of course externally in an attempt to jump on possibly serious weather conditions early. There really is no need for this. All it does is de-value CFA warnings about upcoming conditions. I certainly don't place as much value on the warnings I've been receiving.

I beleive that Australia needs an Emergency Alerting system like that found in America where government agencies may take complete control of every TV/Radio channel as well as call Land and Mobiles in the event of an Emergency. A system like this should be implemented and may have saved many lives over the course of Black Saturday. But I suppose that won't happen for a few years until this damn useless commission is finished... And that's before I even get started on the 140 appliances that have been brought over from NSW when we are nowhere near fully deployed. I'm sure the NSW RFS has area's to defend just like the CFA, they just seem to be willing to be better mates and help out a bit more than we do...