Client Success Story
Emergency
Management Plans on CD
Malcolm McKenzie, Municipal Emergency
Resource Officer , City of Monash
A recent community risk management analysis for the City
of Monash highlighted the importance of preparing
communities for emergencies through a well-communicated emergency
management plan. The City of Monash, like all local
government authorities are required to produce and distribute
emergency management plans to key staff and local agencies.
These plans have traditionally been produced as ring-bound
documents and were prone to be lost on shelves. The City contracted
Spatial Vision to develop its new Emergency Management Plan
in an interactive CD format to enhance dissemination of the
Plan.
Spatial Vision worked closely with the City to design a
web style interface that was familiar to users of the standard
plan but enabled quick cross-references to be made between
key information and maps. It was important that the interactive
CD format be useable on low specification computers to cater
for volunteer organisations. Spatial Vision produced the interactive
CD in a searchable Adobe PDF format using freely
available tools so that copies could be produced at minimal
cost. The CD Plan is programmed so that the users receive
a warning when the plan is out of date. The CD format enables
the plan to be easily distributed, updated and re-issued.
Malcolm McKenzie, Municipal Emergency Resource Officer (MERO)
for City of Monash said that “the CD version of
the City of Monash’s Emergency Management Plan has significantly
raised people’s interest in the plan and encouraged
them to become familiar with its content. This is
a great improvement over sending out folders with reams of
pages that people are not likely to read.”
The
City of Monash was recently been awarded the Australian
Safer Community Award – Victoria in the Local Government
category for their “Interactive Emergency Management Plan”.
The Award was presented by the Minister for Police and Emergency
Services, The Honourable André Haermeyer, in recognition
of the significant contribution made by this innovative information
product. Figure
1: Accepting the Australian Safer Community Award - Victoria
for the City of Monash
The Council has a requirement to make copies and updates of the plan available
to in excess of 40 response and support agencies. Previously
the plan was presented in an A4 binder and consisted of a
significant amount of descriptive text, figures and maps.
Distribution of updates was difficult as holders of these
documents could misplace manuals or don’t necessarily
follow appropriate document control procedures.
Malcolm said “Our Community Risk Management process
has highlighted the importance of our community’s preparedness
for emergencies through a well-communicated emergency management
plan. With changes in technology the requirements of various
agencies to access information can be diverse. It is important
to provide information about emergencies via a range of media.”
In recognising this, the City of Monash approached Spatial
Vision to develop it’s Emergency Management Plan in
an interactive format to enhance the way that information
about the emergency management planning process was disseminated.
The
CD Plan has given the Monash City Council and other agencies efficient
access to information and helped to create a high level of awareness
of the emergency management plan. The regional police command
has loaded the interactive CD-ROM on their Intranet to make it
broadly available to local police staff. The regional police command
would normally receive 6 copies of the plan that may not have
been easily found in an emergency situation.
The CD currently provides all the statutory information required of a Municipal
Emergency Management Plan plus additional information identified
as being required during response and recovery from emergencies.
Further enhancements have been identified for the next version
of the CD providing greater interaction between the user and
the Plan.
Figure
2: The Map interface for the Monash EMP
Figure
3 : The maps include a variety of themes including aerial
photography
Figure
4: City of Monash
The City of Monash has approximately 160,000 residents, and
is in Melbourne’s fastest growing population corridor.
Monash has some of Melbourne’s best known landmarks
within its 82 square kilometres, including Monash University,
the Monash Medical Centre, the Victorian Police Academy and
Jells Park. Council manages 600 hectares of parks, gardens
and reserves within its boundaries. The municipality has a
varied landscape, with many hilly areas and several natural
waterways and bushland areas. The City has experienced a variety
of incidents usually associated with road traffic accidents,
flooding or storm damage. In recent years, it has also experienced
a light aircraft crash and a car bombing. Like all growing
cities, the potential exists for major incidents to occur
involving a significant sector of the community.
Figure
5: The City of Monash Municipal Emergency Management Plan
To date,
the CD Plan has been used in emergency planning and training that will
assist response to future incidents.
Malcolm
McKenzie noted that “it has been recognised in the emergency
management industry that the CD Plan sets a new industry standard in
the provision and dissemination of emergency management information.
As emergency management and planning is a key issue for local authorities,
there is significant potential to see this concept used throughout Australia.”
For
further details about the Monash Interactive Emergency Management Plan
contact Malcolm McKenzie at the City of Monash on (03) 9518 3746 or
Graeme Martin at Spatial Vision on (03) 9691 3000, e-mail graeme.martin@spatialvision.com.au
Copyright
© Spatial Vision, Monday, 16-December-2002
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