A Senate inquiry yesterday found Emergency Alert, the mobile-phone alert system used during the Mitchell chemical fire, was not to blame for the failure of many residents to be warned about the nearby explosion.
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Instead, the committee report found, the system had simply not been used properly.
According to information Attorney-General Robert McClelland provided to the inquiry, authorities made 30,530 calls to 86,801 landlines in 30 minutes on September 16, to warn them about the explosion.
Of those, 13,784 were answered.
Authorities also sent text messages to more than 52,700 mobile phones, of a total pool of 83,774 mobiles.
The committee was established in March to investigate the capacity of communication networks to cope with emergencies and emergency warning systems, and drew on the 2003 Canberra firestorm and 2009 Victorian bushfires.
Emergency Alert, which was used in the Mitchell chemical fire, has been used 330 times and has issued about 7.12 million messages.
Many of the submissions to the inquiry criticised the system because it is unable to gauge where a mobile phone is being held at the time of the message; rather, it decides location based on the phone user's registered address.
The committee found that the inadequate Mitchell fire response ''demonstrated some of the difficulties associated with the lack of a location-based mobile telephone emergency warning capability''.
''However,'' the report said, ''it is also important to note that some of the problems associated with the use of Emergency Alert for the chemical fire arose because the ACT government did not use Emergency Alert in accordance with the 'Recommended Use Guidelines'.'' In a written response to a question on notice from ACT Liberal Senator Gary Humphries tabled on Tuesday, Mr McClelland criticised ACT authorities for halting the dispatch of automated telephone warnings to residents after the statutory 30 minutes, ''in accordance with the landline call volume and system design parameters''.
''The failure to do so meant that there was only sufficient time for a third of the landlines to be dialled.''
In August, the ACT Government outlined its response to recommendations made by the Victorian Bushfire Royal Commission.
At the time, Police and Emergency Services Minister Simon Corbell said a number of measures to improve the community's response to emergencies were in place including changes to the fire danger rating system, the adoption of the emergency alert telephone warning system and updated community information.
The Senate committee yesterday recommended that federal, state and territory emergency services authorities make their radio communication systems interoperable, ''as soon as is practicable'', and that all emergency services attending critical incidents be compelled to communicate on a common platform to allow real-time communication.
Responding to the criticism levelled at ACT authorities by the Federal Government, Emergency Services Agency Commissioner Mark Crosweller said the agency had been open about its mistakes.
''We didn't do it as effectively as we would have liked and we've stepped up and taken responsibility for that,'' Mr Crosweller said.
''We've assessed the way that we used the system, we've improved our procedures, we've improved our training and we've made recommendations back to the system's operator about improving the user interface.''
with Peter Jean
