The Local Government Association of South Australia’s President, David O’Loughlin, has launched a disaster reporting application that has already attracted national interest.
Speaking at July’s Disaster Resilience Conference in Adelaide, Councillor O’Loughlin said the LGA’s Emergency Assessment and Recording System (EARS) had been designed to close a reporting gap noted between emergency service agencies and councils during extreme weather and other disaster situations.
“The EARS app is a cloud-based system which is user friendly and able to record and report incidents as they happen.
“EARS can record voice and video, can process rapidly snapped photos and with its inbuilt GPS can pinpoint incident locations such as flooding or other emergencies.
“Often council staff are on the ground before emergency services or in more locations but until EARS we had no simple way to provide that local intelligence directly to emergency management agencies.
“We have trialled EARS with other key stakeholders including State emergency services agencies and the word has spread to the degree that interstate emergency services are interested in acquiring the technology.”
Councillor O’Loughlin said the LGA had identified a lack of real time recording abilities for councils during emergency situations – the new system would not only assist emergency agencies but also provide invaluable information to assist with disaster relief activities and insurance claims.
“Because EARS records incidents in real time councils and other agencies have on–the–ground, proof positive of incident information.
“The app also gives councils and emergency agencies the ability to note possible impending issues and put mitigation procedures in place.
“We think EARS is a tremendous step forward in emergency reporting and we are very proud of its design and delivery.”
The LGA managed the development of EARS with input from key emergency agencies and organisations such as the Bureau of Meteorology and using funding from the LGA’s Research & Development Scheme and a grant from the Commonwealth/State Natural Disasters Resilience Grants Scheme.
