Due to limited resources, governments often find it difficult to provide sufficient funds to cover the wide range of natural disasters and man-made emergencies and incidents that are impacting our community with greater frequency and ferocity.
In recent years, our emergency service agencies have spent millions of dollars on systems, training, equipment and day-to-day operations to handle their specialist and important public safety responsibilities. Many of these are ‘silos systems’ which are in-house and specific to one particular organisation. When an emergency or major incident occurs, the agencies have to rely largely upon manual systems to work together.
Over the past decade, numerous royal commissions and reviews have highlighted the critical need to share information and produce a common operating picture when dealing with multi-hazard, multi-agency major emergencies and incidents.
The Emergency Management Network has been developed in Australia in response to these needs. Three years of research, trials, development and quality assurance has produced a solution that was successfully trialled at the G8/G20 Summit meetings in Canada in June 2010. The pilot program proved that incidents can be run from anywhere in the world with minimum training.
Since the G8/G20 Summit meetings, the EMN solution has migrated into two streams: