The Republic of Mauritius has completed implementation of a new population alerting solution. The solution was supplied by Everbridge, which specialises in critical event management (CEM) and national public warning solutions.
Mauritius is home to 1.3 million residents and a popular destination for over 1.4 million annual tourists. Thus, this end-to-end public warning solution, deployed on a nationwide basis, aims to protect nearly three million people.
Mauritius’ National Disaster Risk Reduction & Management Centre (NDRRMC) selected Everbridge to power the early warning system for the country’s four islands – the main island of Mauritius and the smaller islands of Rodrigues, Agaléga, and St Brandon.
The solution has been deployed across all government and law enforcement agencies, including the national police, military, fire and rescue services, national coast guard, and meteorological services to immediately inform the public in the event of an emergency.
“The Everbridge public warning system allows us to turn around critical information very quickly,” explains Inspector Hemraj Kumar Mohit of NDRRMC. “Within minutes, we can reach large portions of the population leveraging a system with proven scale.”
Situated in the Indian Ocean, Mauritius is prone to severe weather hazards, as well as oil spills, HAZMAT incidents, and sugarcane fires. In recent torrential rains, the new alert system sent critical, location-based messages via email, SMS, and voice calls to mobile and landline phones before, during, and after the emergency, and was integrated with the filtered alert hub, radio, and social media through the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), an XML-based data format for exchanging public warnings and emergencies between alerting technologies.
This is not the only emergency communications announcement by an Indian Ocean country in recent days. As we reported earlier this week, the Seychelles Meteorological Authority (SMA) has signed an agreement with the country’s two largest telecommunication companies with the aim of bringing SMS-based disaster risk alerts to the public.
