ONE of the biggest issues facing Tamborine Mountain residents during periods of emergencies is the struggle to get timely information.
Frustrated with the lack of communication, Steven Vawdrey took matters into his own hands developing a new SMS service to keep residents updated in emergencies.
“I’ve been here for 15 years and lost count of the number of times I’ve lost communication from agencies,” he said.
“The communication has been quite poor. Our council has struggled to communicate during extreme weather events. They have failed to alleviate people’s concerns relating to road closures and access to petrol.”
Steve, who owns VAUX a digital infrastructure and marketing business on the mountain, reached out to the community to understand if there was a demand for such a service.
He said since the recent launch almost 400 locals have signed up.
The service delivers concise SMS alerts to subscribers with information such as storm warnings, power outages, road closures, fire bans, and availability of essential supplies. In major weather events, a single daily SMS update is sent to reduce message fatigue and help preserve battery life.
Steve said information is sourced from multiple trusted outlets, including the Bureau of Meteorology, Energex, Rural Fire Service, SES, local Facebook disaster groups, IGA supermarket, the petrol station, and local churches.
“Every message is written by local residents with reliable electricity and internet access during extreme conditions,” he said.
Messages are sent through a secure Australian-hosted SMS gateway, and subscriber details remain private. The platform has been built with cloud-based redundancy and tested fail-safes to ensure maximum reliability.
“We have the ability to bulk upload. If there is a community group focusing on people of a certain age, we could work with them and easily add them to the list providing them with that direct daily SMS,” he explained.
“This service doesn’t replace updates from Energex or Council,” Steven said.
“It complements them by aggregating information from multiple sources into one trusted message for our community. The real test will be in distributing accurate, timely information during adverse conditions — something that has often been lacking in the past.”
He said the next step was to utilise radio and probably AI infrastructure that would read out messages to FM in a loop.
“We will continue to refine it as we go. We’d like to work with other organisations to distribute information either through the website or other means.”
