Victoria Police Recognises SAS Volunteers

Assisting Victoria Police in an Australia-first project to track victims, survivors and unaccounted persons at the time of the February bushfires: 

SAS Australia’s Melbourne employees:

• Customised ‘Unaccounted Persons’ solution to assist emergency services
• Deployed advanced software analytics to create accurate situation picture
• Gave three weeks of their round-the-clock time.

SYDNEY, Australia  (29 Jun 2009)  –  At a private function at Victoria Police headquarters in Melbourne last week, several employees of SAS Australia were recognised for their help at the time of February’s ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires.

SAS was presented with a commemorative plaque by Superintendent Richard Grant APM, of Victoria Police’s Corporate Strategy & Performance Department.  The plaque was inscribed – “In appreciation and to acknowledge the assistance of SAS in helping to develop the Victoria Police Unaccounted Persons System in response to the Black Saturday bushfires – February 2009”.

SAS had already been a supplier of business intelligence and analytical software tools and services to Victoria Police for some years and was the logical partner to step forward and be involved in the exercise.

The fires – the worst modern Australia has ever suffered – claimed 173 lives and raged for four days across an area of almost 2,600 square kilometres, much of which was sparsely populated.

Presenting the plaque and thanking SAS, Superintendent Grant said, "Without the SAS experts from the company's Melbourne office who volunteered their time around the clock for three weeks, determining the final unaccounted persons position would have taken much longer than it did and could not have been as certain."

Responding, Mr Christian Anders, SAS’ Victoria State Manager, thanked the Superintendent for his generous words and added, “SAS is very proud of the people who so quickly formed the team at such a critical time and who worked tirelessly to help Victoria Police meet its Unaccounted Persons-tracking objectives.

“All of them are highly qualified people and each is one of Australia’s foremost experts in their particular part of the business intelligence and analytical software field.  And, as they demonstrated to us in February, they are all good citizens for Victoria, too.”

Superintendent Richard Grant elaborated on the task in February saying, “Until you know exactly who ‘belongs’ in an affected area at the time of such an incident, you can’t say who is believed to be missing and who is not.  People who are away at the time of the incident or who had recently moved out of the district must be presumed missing until you learn otherwise.  Quickly working out the true situation is far from straightforward and until you have done so, you don’t know where to keep looking for possible victims; where to deploy your resources.”

Mr Anders added, “Globally, SAS has provided advanced software and the expertise of its people to help cope with disasters ranging from fires such as we saw here in February, to tornadoes in the United States and tsunamis in South Asia.  This was the first time our solution had been deployed here in Australia, however, and its success is also testament to the efficacy of our worldwide support infrastructure.”

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