Monash City Council recently won the Australian Safer Community Award – Victorian Local Government category, for its interactive Emergency Management Plan CD. Councils are required by law to distribute emergency management plans to key staff and local agencies. However, these large ring bound documents are often left buried beneath other papers until an emergency actually takes place.
“Our Community Risk Management Process highlighted the importance of our community’s preparedness for emergencies through a well communicated emergency management plan,” said Malcolm McKenzie, Deputy Municipal Emergency Resource Officer at the City of Monash. “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.”
Recognising this, the City of Monash approached Spatial Vision, a company specialising in presenting spatial information, to produce its Emergency Management Plan in an interactive format.
Spatial Vision developed the Monash Emergency Management Plan as a web style interface that provides quick cross referencing to information and maps. The interactive CD is useable on low specification computers with much of the information being supplied in Adobe PDF format to cater for volunteer organisations. It features a home page, text versions of the Council’s emergency management and evacuation plans, a quick reference guide and thematic maps, all linked for easy navigation by the user.
The City of Monash has approximately 160,000 residents, and is in Melbourne’s fastest growing population corridor. 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.
“As emergency management and planning is a key issue for local authorities, there is significant potential to see this concept used throughout Australia,” said Malcolm Mackenzie.
For further information contact Malcolm McKenzie at the City of Monash on (03) 9518 3746, or Graeme Martin at Spatial Vision on (03) 9691 3000, email graeme.martin@spatialvision.com.au
