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Could cars be co-opted for a public alarm system?
WITH climate change threatening increasingly fierce bushfires has the time come to roll out an alarm system of public sirens? In the wake of Black Saturday there are many Victorians who want to see the return of the fire sirens that used to pepper country towns. But would such systems - and such old technology - really be effective?
There has been a similar debate in Europe where some have been arguing for a return of the old air raid sirens to give the public warning of floods, large fires or serious industrial accidents like major chemical spills.
Reactivating a siren system would not be cheap and in Germany it has even been calculated that the cost of a fully operational, 24/7 nationwide siren network could cost “several 100 million Euros”.
But a group of German researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Technological Trend Analysis may have come up with a cheap, if controversial solution. They want to create a Europe-wide alarm network using the horns of parked cars. (Read more here.)
The institute says the infrastructure for such a system is already due to be rolled out in the shape of Europe’s just as controversial “eCall” system which aims to have all new cars fitted with an automatic system that alerts emergency authorities immediately the vehicle is involved in a crash.
Although “eCall” is specifically designed to help emergency services respond faster, the Germans believe a car's eCall “black box” could easily double as a device that would allow the car’s horn to be activated remotely.
As the German researchers envision it, the eCall system would let operators at civil protection agencies use GPS satellites to pinpoint all parked cars in a disaster threatened area and then at the press of a button activate all the car horns as a public warning to anyone in the vicinity.
According to Guido Huppertz, one of the researchers, the big advantage of using car horns is that everyone can hear the alarm sound. He says others people have suggested alarm systems based on mobile phones - but such a system would only work if everyone carried a mobile phone.
Mr Huppertz said the research team had calculated that in Germany’s case, using car horns would make for an effective nationwide alarm system if just 14% of the nation’s cars where fitted with eCall black boxes.
He said that assuming the eCall rollout starts at the end of next year, then within two to four years there would be sufficient black boxes installed to form a national alarm network.
