VicEmergency

Department of Justice & Community Safety, Victoria

About this app

VicEmergency is the official Victorian Government app for emergency warnings and information. Download VicEmergency, set up a user profile and watch zones to ensure you receive official warnings and information for areas that interest you.

Watch the VicEmergency video at www.youtube.com/channel/UCskGgVGdfEp1C3BMiiwAyzQ
To review support articles or submit a request, visit http://support.emergency.vic.gov.au

Main Features:
• Live incident map showing current warnings, planned burns and other types of incidents across Victoria.***
• Simple to create a profile and use watch zones that ensure you get official warnings for your local area. Warnings and information* are pushed out to a user's phone when issued by Victoria’s emergency services. 
• GPS integration to determine your current location** and surrounding incidents. 
• Emergency Warnings, Warnings, Advice and information as issued by Victoria’s emergency services
• Share incidents and warnings with friends and family.
• View forecast Fire Danger Ratings on the map.
• View today's and tomorrow’s Total Fire Ban status.

* Your device must have an internet connection to receive warnings and information issued by Victorian emergency services. 
** To view your current location, GPS must be switched on and location functionality enabled.
*** Map symbols represent the origin of the emergency, not its current location or spread.

The VicEmergency app is just one tool to assist you to access warnings and information about emergencies, however you should never rely on just one information channel. Emergency services use a range of other information channels including SKY TV, ABC local radio, some commercial and designated community radio stations, VicEmergency Hotline on 1800 226 226, VicEmergency website on www.emergency.vic.gov.au and VicEmergency Twitter and Facebook.

What's New in this Version?
• Addition of other types of emergencies e.g. flood, earthquake, storms, tsunami, shark sightings etc
• Addition of user profile so watch zones can be accessed across multiple devices
• Integration of user profiles and watch zones with the VicEmergency website
• Addition of landscape view for all screens
• Addition of custom tone for notifications
• Addition of edit function for all aspects of watch zones
• Addition of warning notifications by email

Are you getting a message asking Allow "VicEmergency" to access to your location? You need to allow access to see incidents and warnings for your current location. The steps for this will vary depending on your device, model and version of android, but should be similar to this:
• Open device settings
• Select applications
• Select manage applications
• Choose VicEmergency from the list
• Tick the ‘show notifications’ box at the top of the screen

Ratings and reviews

The general premise of the app is a good one, even though the user interface of this particular version is chaotic and appears to have been designed by a committee. But my main concern is with the quality of people feeding information into it. Due to heavy spamming of identical 'watch and act' messages (sometimes less than 10min apart), I've had to disable notifications entirely because this category of message can't be selectively disabled, which sort of defeats the entire purpose of the app.

When the app works, its great. Unfortunately a large majority of the time I find it freezes and I cannot manipulate the map or get into the details of the alert. Restarting my phone doesn't even reset the app. At least the alerts work.

Whilst the App generally works well, there are 2 issues that cometo mind. Firstly it insists upon alerting me to storms outside of my set watch area / weather district. Secondly, it makes multiple attempts to send data to Google and Facebook; access to neither of these are necessary for the App function.

What's new

- Adopted the Australian Fire Danger Rating System which standardises our use of fire danger ratings nationally.
- Updated our base map to the latest Spatial Vision VicMap Book
- Improved compatibility with the latest devices