Queensland Disaster Management Coordinators are working with their neighbouring shires in drawing up Memorandums of Understanding to ensure they can hold each other’s data and support each other’s centres with staff trained in Guardian.
Guardian has been recently installed at Townsville City Council and Tablelands Regional Councils, training has taken place at Cassowary Coast Regional Council and Whitsunday Regional Council and preparations are underway for the first ESRI ARC GIS integrated site at Mackay City.
GIS Companies are supporting their Council sites and working with QIT Plus to ensure a smooth interface for dynamic mapping is achieved.
“We are proud of the relationships we have built with MapInfo, ESRI Australia and AusSoft,” said Chris Madsen, Director QIT Plus. “Sales executives are supportive of council licences and have worked extensively to provide opportunities for disaster management systems to be made available to our Local Disaster Management Groups.”
Darwin City Council has recently performed a six hour cyclone simulation using Guardian.
“With 25 per cent of staff unfamiliar with the program they still performed extremely well under this simulated environment,” Chris Madsen said. “Congratulations to the organisers who had the control centre fully set up and operational in under 40 minutes ready for the 20 staff operating the control centre.”
Darwin staff have recent experience from dealing with Cyclone Helen in February 2008, with some still remembering the events of Cyclone Tracey of 1974.
New modules for Guardian include call registers for information. Call centre staff can quickly register information calls taken and this information supplied is made available for all others to view.
Pre-impact modules now allow bulk task entry, warnings and zones can be updated by selecting an area on the map. Linked with SMS notifications this is a tremendous warning and alert module.
Templates for media releases and official bulletins can now be used to quickly produce official reports in the correct format for issue to District and State Offices and media channels.
GPS coordinates and Street Directory references for every task are automatically written to the job sheet to help those assisting to locate addresses.
“Guardian helps you to organise resources, contacts, site information, welfare centres and equip your control centre with the tools to effectively coordinate your disaster response,” Chris Madsen said.
*Copy supplied by QIT Plus
