I live in Dereel, 100 km west
of Melbourne. In early 2009 Victoria
experienced its worst bushfires ever, and people are in a state of panic about a repeat.
But they're not addressing what I see as a serious problem that could be easily solved:
timely information about bushfires. The information is spread across at least five
different media, all giving a different angle:
Local radio broadcasts information at irregular intervals, but typically on the hour and
half hour. In the meantime you need to listen to their programme, whether you want to or
not, to be sure not to miss anything.
There's a Bushfire Telephone Information Line (1 800 240 667) that you can call for
specific information. On the one occasion I did so, they weren't aware of known fires in
my area. That's why it's been the one time.
There's the general emergency telephone line, 000. They do know what's going on,
but you're not supposed to call them unless there's a dire emergency. Until they fix the
Bushfire Information Line, though, I don't see any alternative. What would you do if you
saw smoke?
This page infuriates me for a number of reasons. I've already mentioned one, but there
are others. In particular, it presents the information in a window, roughly limited to
the width of the map above it:
As a result, the information is truncated, though it would comfortably fit on the page
if it hadn't been artificially limited. It used to have scroll bars, but they've
removed them some time in the last year. Here's what it looked like earlier:
The columns at the right are not the least important; the last one is the status, which was
completely hidden in this particular display. And I couldn't even look in the HTML: they
appear to use some Javascript tricks to get the information from elsewhere. I'll persevere
and find how to get the information and display it correctly, but I'm left with the
impression that the design of this page depends more on the ideas of some
“clever” web programmers than on a desire to get timely information. There's no
date or time on the page, the layout assumes low-resolution displays and breaks badly on
higher-resolution displays, and of course it contains many validation errors But then, not even DSE wants to rely on it:
This state map is automatically generated and may contain errors.
The CFA maintains a Information web site
with current activity information. It used to be terrible, but at least it now displays
all the information it intends too. It renders badly on my screen, presumably because of
invalid assumptions made by the web programmers. At the time of writing, the W3 Markup Validation Service found 197 errors on the page.
