Home > News > Community sirens

Community sirens

Posted by Bushfire Preparedness Program 2009/10

Friday, 04 September 2009

Jump to photos

As the summer season approaches, many staff and volunteers are being asked by the community for advice around sirens.

The Bushfire Preparedness Program is working with the Office of the Emergency Services Commissioner (OESC) and CFA to provide some more advice around this for the community and brigades. The OESC is tasked with providing a state-wide community sirens policy, including some guidelines around how CFA sirens (existing or in the future) might be used for community warnings. CFA continues to support the use of existing CFA sirens to alert brigade members to respond to the fire station.

So far the project team have reviewed available information and are exploring what the CFA guidelines might need to include so that there are consistent and effective processes if a community wishes to use them as a part of a local warning system.

It’s a complex issue, but the project team are hoping to provide some more information and guidance at the start of next month.

In the meantime, if staff and volunteers are being asked by the community to use a local CFA siren as a warning they can provide some information about the local siren, how it is used and its capability and offer to revisit the topic next month, when guidelines are available.

For more information and updates from the Bushfire Preparedness Program, click here.

Location:

General

Categories:

Community Safety, Operational Information

More in this category:

Fire Action Week 2010 | D13 Boundary Alignment Update 26

Last modified on Tuesday, 08 September 2009 20:31

Bookmark

Email this

Comments (2) Add Comment

Subscribe to this comment's feed

brigade sirens used for alerting cmmunitys
written by rob langston, September 10, 2009

This is not a good idea the geographical location of the station to the ares that need to be alerted is not practical we here in churchill use our siren between 6am to 8pm aand only a few people who live and work within a short distance from the station can hear it, we use it to let people who can hear it that the brigade is active and busy.
The people in areas that may be at risk in the urban rural interface will not hear it at all

-1

...
written by Sarah Black, September 13, 2009

I think there will be a lot of opposition to siren use, for exactly the reasons outlined in the last comment, they simply can't be heard by many people, and that is dependent on wind direction etc as well. Ours is no longer used.