The Mitchell chemical fire exposed glaring flaws in the territory's emergency alert system, with warning phone calls failing to reach 80 per cent of inner-north residents threatened by the potentially dangerous smoke plume.
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The Emergency Services Agency attempted to send two emergency alerts during the fire on September16, the first at 1.38am telling Mitchell residents to evacuate, and the second at 3.19am warning inner-north residents to shelter indoors from what were then considered dangerous toxins.
But The Canberra Times can reveal that the Emergency Alert system, which is used by every state and territory except Western Australia, has systematic flaws that prevent it from effectively delivering messages to large sections of a population.
A report into emergency alerts during the fire, to be issued by the Government today, shows the second emergency alert sent on the morning of the fire was supposed to reach 86,801 home phones, and 83,774 mobiles in the suburbs of Franklin, Crace, Harrison, Watson, Downer, Kaleen, Lyneham and Hackett.
But a staggering 80 per cent - or nearly 70,000 - of those home calls were never made, and 32 per cent, or 26,740, text messages were never sent.
The error arose because of the slow nature of the emergency alert system.
It would have required up to seven hours to send the emergency alerts out to inner-north residents on the morning of the Mitchell fire.
By that time, the factory fire had been contained, and the health warnings were already being discounted.
Emergency services staff programmed the alert system to deliver messages for only 30 minutes, meaning that the majority of phone calls were never made, and many texts were never sent.
Significant issues were also identified during the first emergency message sent to warn residents in Mitchell to evacuate immediately.
Despite Mitchell containing just 1500 addresses, more than 22,598 phone calls were made.
Emergency Services Minister Simon Corbell said this was because businesses were receiving a phone call to every single phone line in their office.
While Mr Corbell admitted this unnecessarily clogged up the alert system, slowing it down considerably, he said there was no way to fix the flaw.
It has also been revealed that mass testing of the Emergency Alert system had not been conducted before the Mitchell fire.
Smaller tests, which made 1573 automated phone calls and sent 5000 SMS texts, had been conducted in June, but they failed to pick up on the issues that plagued the system's use during the chemical fire.
Mr Corbell believes the flaws experienced in the ACT could occur in every other state and territory in Australia, except Western Australia, which uses a different alert system.
''If the expectation is that this is a mass warning system, it's got some clear limitations based on the ACT experience,'' Mr Corbell said.
''The system did reach a large number of residents, but it did not reach everyone. It clearly has some technical limitations,'' Mr Corbell said.
He will warn ministerial colleagues, including Federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland, of the problems experienced in the ACT.
Problems were also experienced with SMS messages sent during the chemical fire.
Text messages were sent to people who had a current billing address within the threatened suburbs. But many people had not updated their billing details, meaning those who had recently moved out of or into the suburbs did not receive the alert.
The spelling errors contained in both emergency text messages were attributed to a mistake in using phonetic spelling for the automated phone call, and then failing to correct the final spelling of the alert for the SMS.
Despite admitting the system does not have the capacity to deliver emergency alerts to large sections of Canberra, Mr Corbell said there were no plans to move away from the Emergency Alert system. Instead, he is reminding the public that they should not rely on a single source of information during times of emergency.
Mr Corbell said the Government's alert system should be supplemented by listening to radio, using social media, and accessing information from the Emergency Services Agency website, which will be relaunched today. ''It's important to stress that a significant number of people, thousands and thousands of households, were still contacted on the early morning of the 16th of September,'' he said.
Today's report recommends that SMS messages be sent out before automated phone calls, to speed up the alert process.
It also recommends tweaking the Emergency Alert system to warn emergency services staff if they have not allowed it enough time to send out all the phone calls and text messages.
ESA staff, the report says, should be further trained in how to use the system, and quality assurance measures put in place to ensure spelling errors are not made in SMS messages.
