No, unfortunately we DO NOT ACCEPT:

• WhatsApp, telegram, SMS’s etc as ways to alert the emergency control room
• Social media comments (Facebook, twitter etc) as ways to alert the Emergency control room.

These platforms are not monitored on a continuous basis, and thus we can not guarantee that we will see the emergency alert in time to respond effectively.

If there is a community whatsapp group / telegram group, we will not go onto it to monitor activity OR for that community group to be used as a way of alerting us to an incident.

The only time in which we may use such groups on Telegram is to post an incident or in response groups that are managing incidents however these are not available for public use.

Times when SMS text or WhatsApp might be used during an emergency:

In the event of an incident, we want to be able to find out your location in order to assist with dispatching:

• If you have the AAA Response App, when you activate the panic button, it sends us your location and at the same time you will start talking to the ERPC (in order to preserve member privacy, we can’t randomly track a member location, and you would need to have hit the panic button or the TrackMe function on the App which authorises us to track your location)
• Or we need to verbally ask for your location if you don’t have the app.

In our experience, especially if a member is under duress, members struggle to articulate their location. Hence we have two solutions if they can’t answer properly  / aren’t sure where they are, in which case we can use WhatsApp as a potential tool as a means to get the location from the member via location sharing