BART was initially developed by EMERG back in 2004 on the request of one of the employees to assist the Lilydale CFA in Victoria.  A volunteer with extraordinary mapping expertise and working for our company (operating for over 50 years) was able to provide a solution for volunteers in his community. From that installation, over twenty brigades over five years ran BART at their stations.

In 2009, Emerg decided to redevelop BART from a solution using equipment at the station to an internet solution that was easy and simple to use and easy to administer locally. Emerg completed a global internet solution for the ACT Government covering every department collecting payments in the ACT. This solution formed the initial infrastructure for BART operating out of the EMERG Service Center.

Today in September 2019, with eight passionate staff working day to day with over 30 passionate BART supporters and advisers across Australia, we have a communication system built for volunteers, emergency personnel and first responders. BART is utilised by over 45000 members working in over 4500 brigades, units, branches and groups throughout Australia – 24/7. BART is and continues to be community member driven solution with the ability to connect to regions and agencies. The growth over the past ten years has been solely by word of mouth and recommendations from brigades. Our growth has been and continues to be around 1000 new members each month.

Over the ten years, we have moved from a simple accept and decline Smart Phone App to an all embracing communication system which covers broadcasting, discussions, availability, events, tracking vehicles and people, building crews as well as the ability to connect to complimentary systems. BART still remains easy to use, simple and locally managed.

We’ve moved BART over to Amazon Web Services, with three synchronised servers all located in Australia as recommended by Amazon integration experts.  This occurred in 2018, after we built the Rostering Solution for the Victorian Police where AWS was a fundamental requirement to the four year contract we have with VicPol. A modified version of the Rostering system is included in the BART Roadmap.

We are partners with Motorola as both organizations see the benefit of providing Radio and Smart Phone communication in the future.

Five good reasons why Members Love BART:

  1. Easy and simple to use
  2. Know who is coming
  3. Know where to go
  4. Have situation awareness
  5. Work as a Team protecting their Community

The BART Team look forward to continuing to assist your team and community.

Jan Wandek FCPA
CEO

Latest Enhancements

The BART development team have been working hard, and we’re excited to announce some brand-new updates.

Local Support Clusters

We regularly see entire districts signup up to BART, which benefits members and management alike. It can make communication and information sharing easier between neighbouring groups, and can also provide management with a detailed overview of all ongoing operations within the district.

For groups who don’t have the entire district on-board with BART, we’ve added functionality that will allow you to easily connect with your neighbours. ‘Local Support Clusters’ operate in the same way as districts, however your association with other groups is completely optional. Your Local Support Cluster can include two or more groups, across multiple agencies to aid in better interoperability.

If you would like to create or join a new support cluster, please visit our website and fill out the form provided:
Local Support Cluster Request Form

Upon joining a cluster, your group will be aware of the alerts and responses occurring within your general area to provide enhanced situational awareness. To make sure you don’t get your cluster alerts mixed up with your own, we’ve added an option to set two different alert tones.

New Alert Tone Options

We have introduced a range of new broadcast tone options, which will allow you to customise the tone played for different types of messages:

  • Standard Tone
  • Alert Tone
  • Discussion Tone
  • District Standard Tone
  • District Alert Tone

Critical Alerts

You can now choose to enable ‘Critical Alerts’ for your iPhone, where alerts will always play a sound and appear on the lock screen – even if your smartphone is muted or ‘Do not Disturb’ is on.

This feature is now available on both the Apple and Android smartphones.

General Updates

Other updates and enhancements include:

  • Administrators can accept group requests via the BART Team App
  • Reporting for ‘Non-incidents’
  • Use the crew builder functionality for ‘non-incident’ broadcast types
  • Choose a Broadcast Tag when Creating an Event
  • Create a ‘Confirmed’ event without a notification
  • An ‘Engaged’ status is now applied to members attending a callout
  • Authorised members can now send to District broadcast tags
  • The attendees list within the district view is now sorted by group
  • General Dashboard fixes and enhancements

For a full list of BART’s latest updates, check out the Release Notes

Send us your Photos

Meet other BART members from all across Australia.

As part of preparations for BART’s 10-year anniversary, we’re asking for photos of your brigade, group or unit. The photos that we collect will be put together to create a gallery on our website that celebrates the various types and locations of emergency headquarters across the country.

To join in, send us a photo of your headquarters and you could be in the running to win one of these neat BART caps.

You can email your photos to: [email protected]