Outage forced system offline for hours overnight

“Like all technological solutions, they need to be phased out over time and replaced with more up-to-date technologies, and this process continues,” he said.

Asked if delivery of the upgrade had been too slow, Emery said: “It’s a major upgrade… it covers all emergency service organizations… and it’s happening as we speak.”

Victoria Ambulance Association secretary Danny Hill said the outage had caused major inefficiencies in the emergency response process.

When the CAD system goes down, dispatchers lose the ability to track the location of resources across the state.

“So when a job comes in for Preston, for example, they can see there’s an ambulance two kilometers down the road. When that system goes down, they actually have to get on the radio and ask: ‘Is there any crew available for the job in Preston?’ They have to do all this manually,” Hill said.

Call takers are forced to manually type in all incident information, which is then physically handed to a dispatcher to assign the case, Hill said.

“Basically going back a few decades in time is a very, very inefficient way of doing things,” he said. “It makes it categorically harder. And often crews on the road don’t get the information they need.”

Hill said he was aware of a pediatric case in Werribee where paramedics requested support from the Mobile Intensive Care Ambulance (MICA) unit overnight.

Due to the outage, dispatchers initially believed the nearest MICA unit was available in the CBD.

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“Then they found out there was a MICA team much, much closer in Deer Park, but they couldn’t see the closest team because the system was down,” he said.

Emergency Services Minister Vicki Ward said the Triple Zero backup power system should have been activated during the outage.

“We don’t know why it didn’t happen. We’re investigating that,” he said. “This has never happened before.”

Ward said he was notified that all calls to Triple Zero were placed during the outage.

Prime Minister Jacinta Allan said the outage was being investigated. He was told there were no negative consequences but asked for more information.

“The cause of the power outage is still under investigation,” Allan said.

Opposition emergency services spokesman Danny O’Brien described the system failure as a “serious concern” and added that the government needed to provide a clear explanation of what caused the incident.

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