Emergency WA’s ‘technical difficulties’ resolved after residents left without access to bushfire information

WA’s bushfire emergency alert system is back working after technical issues lasting almost three hours prevented residents from accessing vital information in the middle of five bushfire emergencies.

The system was thrown into chaos on Monday afternoon, as the EmergencyWA website and app experienced “technical difficulties” as multiple bushfires burned across the State.

Residents were left unable to view important details about evacuations and the behaviour of bushfires, an issue that was first identified at 12.50pm.

A department of fire and emergency spokesperson said the issue, which impacted the website and EmergencyWA application, was resolved at 3.16pm on Monday.

In a statement shared with The West Australian, a DFES spokesperson said the issue was a result of their software provider experiencing a “data processing problem”

“The technical difficulties the Emergency WA website and app experienced today were identified at 12.50pm and resolved by 3.16pm,” they said.

“The issue was caused by a data processing problem.

“Alerts and warnings were not impacted on the DFES Facebook page and people could still hear the warnings when they called 13DFES (133337).

“DFES has asked the software provider to take immediate action to mitigate against reoccurrence.”

Media outlets and relevant stakeholders still received emails detailing warnings in order to aid in the publication and sharing of emergency alerts to the public when the website and application was down.

Push notifications on the EmergencyWA app were still working, according to DFES.

The West Australian can reveal that there was also a technical issue with DFES’ automatic vehicle location system, which has since been resolved.

A spokesperson said there was “no impact on DFES operations, including DFES ability to track personnel locations” as a result of those “technical issues”.

“There have been no outages of the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system over the weekend or today,” they said.

After being alerted to the situation by The West Australian, Emergency Services Minister Paul Papalia confirmed the system was experiencing issues on Monday.

“We don’t know what’s caused it and they’re investigating, hopefully they get it back online as soon as possible,” he said at the time.

“There is no good time for the system to go down in Western Australia, we are a third of the continent, any time of the year, we can be confronting emergency situations where we need this system up and running, and so, hopefully, they’ll get it back as soon as possible.”

Shadow Emergency Services Minister Rob Horstman described the alert system going down as “disappointing”.

“This is a vital system which people across the State depend on and we cannot afford to have it suffer technical difficulties in the height of bushfire season,” he said.

“It is easy to forget that every day there are more than about 30 different fires raging across different parts of our State and these can be tracked, in real time, on the DFES website, which is a lifeline to those living in bushfire prone areas.

“Our career and volunteer firefighters, as well as their emergency service colleagues, also need access to accurate, real-time information through appropriate information and communication systems.

“As such it is of paramount importance that the digital backbone of WA’s emergency services doesn’t suffer from similar ‘technical difficulties’ during what has already proven to be an incredibly challenging fire season.”