Dealing with forest fires

Melbourne-based HVP is claimed to be Australia’s largest private timber plantation company, managing around 245,000 hectares of land across Victoria — annually supplying some three million tonnes of softwood (pine) and three hundred thousand tonnes of hardwood (eucalypt) to sawmillers, panel producers and pulp and paper mills in Australia and overseas.

A major risk during the summer months is bushfire, and as a member of the CFA (Country Fire Authority) Forest Industry Brigades, company staff manage a fleet of private firefighting vehicles which work in conjunction with state firefighting agencies during fire events.

An accident during the Tolmie-Tatong fires in 2007 left two employees with serious neck injuries after a burning tree fell on their vehicle’s roof.

“One of the broader issues examined as a result of that incident was how HVP provides and maintains safe working conditions for its employees when a significant proportion of those employees is travelling and working alone,” explained HVP risk and safety manager Martin Fuller.

“They often work in isolated rural locations either as part of their day-to-day employment or when they are involved in fire suppression operations.”

The company’s IT manager, Bruce Fowler, said: “Our ability to effectively respond to safety incidents is critically dependent on early notification; of knowing who is involved and where they are, and getting the right resources to them in the shortest possible time.”

The timber company worked with its project partner ComGroup to develop a solution that delivered the following key objectives:

• Maintain current operational communications access, coverage and inter-agency compatibility;
• Obtain near-real-time GPS location and status information from vehicles either on demand (pull) or in response to predefined events (push — eg, duress);
• Provide employees with a duress facility accessible when working either inside and outside their vehicle;
• Provide a software interface capable of managing and reporting fleet activity — including the ability to plot current and historical vehicle status and location information on a map containing spatial elements from the corporate GIS;
• Provide support for email and SMS duress notification;
• Provide system redundancy and failover support.

All HVP vehicles were fitted with Simoco SRM9022 mobile radios optioned with GPS serial boards.

These radios use their multi-mode capability to communicate with agencies on conventional fire ground channels during a fire event. They report their status and GPS position to an array of control points using the Telstra fleetcoms VHF trunked network.

Telstra provides a facility known as group-based registration that allows a vehicle position to be transmitted simultaneously to any tracking control point.

This permits monitoring stations to be configured to monitor vehicle movements in other regions as well as their own — offering the flexibility to locate and partner monitoring stations where and as required to support operational needs.

Each control point is connected to a SAMS5000 AVL software application running on either a PC for fixed, or a laptop for mobile operations.

The SAMS5000 AVL application uses the official Australian GNAF vector maps to provide a spatial representation of all public areas and HVP has integrated elements of its own GIS dataset to enable more detailed mapping information to be displayed (eg, road network, topology, hydrology, plantation and estate boundaries).

This enables controllers to monitor a vehicle fleet regardless of its physical location, and irrespective of whether it’s on a public road or operating within the HVP estate.

In addition to the GPS positioning enhancement, the upgrade of the Simoco dual-mode radio fleet includes an emergency duress facility which can be activated by the driver or passenger pressing the orange button on the radio or handset.

The duress facility extends to the company’s fleet of SRP9130Plus portable radios and transportables fitted with SRM9030 control heads.

The duress facility is fitted to all vehicles and transportables and comes with a small remote pendant on a lanyard which can be activated from up to 200 m from the vehicle.

Bruce said, “Once activated, the system sends a priority alert across the radio network to a monitoring station array, which then triggers an email and SMS notification to a nominated distribution list — ensuring high visibility and an immediate and targeted response to any safety incident.”