Council will be closed for the ANZAC day public holiday. All services will return to ordinary hours on Friday 26 April 2024.
Shoalhaven City Council has been notified of a data breach of the ‘OracleCMS’ which the Council uses as its after-hours phone call service provider.
Council is experiencing delays in assessment timeframes. The Assessment Team are working through applications at full capacity and request patience with our staff during this time.
In This Section
Community Information Hubs have been installed across the Shoalhaven at twenty-one community halls, all four showgrounds, four Holiday Haven tourist parks and one community-owned facility (Wandandian Progress Hall) as your reliable source of timely, accurate and relevant information for your local area in both emergency and non-emergency situations.
To find your nearest community information hub, search your address or view the map below:
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Shoalhaven City Council’s aim is to grow community-led resilience, and to plan, prepare, respond and recover from emergencies and disaster situations.
The NSW State Government’s independent inquiry into the Summer 2020 bushfires outlined a number of community needs from the numerous statements and testimonies given by those affected by disasters. The instability and vulnerability of power grids and telecommunications infrastructure during a disaster was identified as the main disruption to communications networks.
The summary report of the inquiry states that "Information should be available to communities and individuals in real time, on live warning signs in town centres using satellite connections so they are not reliant on telecommunications infrastructure".
The access — or lack thereof — of authoritative, timely, accurate and local information was a significant cause of community concern during the 2019/2020 bushfires.
"So we have to think, how can we build something to help with resilience and to make life in the future better? And of course, it comes back to communications and power. What I think you'll see at your Community Information Hub is an example of something that can be rolled out nationally eventually. Because the community now always has this point of truth, no longer having to rely on Facebook or rumours or whatever, they can come to their own place and go, yes, this is where the local information is." — Mayor Amanda Findley (Callala Bay pilot site, August 2022)
For the purpose of electricity and telecommunications, the halls and facilities across the Shoalhaven that have installed Community Information Hubs have been transformed into sites that are not reliant on the infrastructure around them.
How has this been done; how does it look? Enjoy a walk through tour of the pilot site in Callala Bay with Project Co-ordinator Vince Di Pietro.
When you visit a Community Information Hub you'll notice a satellite receiver and transmitter dish along with 16 solar panels on the roof. This power feeds into a locally manufactured 'inverter', which captures 100% of the energy generated by each individual panel.
The energy captured is then combined and fed through a Tesla control panel and delivered to the state of the art 3.5 kilowatt 'Powerwall' Tesla battery, ensuring storage for three or four days of continuous power to essential services in emergency situations.
Additionally, a 1.5-kilowatt cavity is fitted for a hand driven Honda generator. This means that all the essential services can run for as long as diesel/petrol is available even if electric power was to completely run out.
This reults in three levels of redundancy for power in an emergency — all separated from the surrounding local infrastructure. Additionally, all halls and facilities that have a Hub installed are now carbon negative. They are producing more power than is being used and what is not being drawn is feeding straight back into the power grid.
The satellite communications are the 'brains' of the installation. A satellite control box, satellite modem and 'voice-over-IP' telephone (using internet signals rather than phone signals) are stored within a secure media rack on each site.
Each phone has a phone number attached to it, allowing for two-way communication via satellite at 33 to 35 megabytes per second speeds with no latency.
This ensures that these facilities, and their surrounding communities, will never be isolated by damage to communications and power infrastructure again.
Each Hub screen is a commercially available, 55-inch, single-sided portrait display panel. The mounting frames for these screens, designed and engineered locally at South Coast Glass, are all vandal proof, bug proof and dust proof.
Each frame is fully ventilated to ensure that the screen doesn't fail due to temperature variation or heat from direct sunlight.
In non-emergency situations the local community has control over the screens, which they can turn on or off using a standard Samsung remote.
Whilst advertising a business is not permitted, every local sporting club or community group can utilise their screen for promoting 'what's on'.
This might be the next weekend market, a fundraiser at the hall, a notice of a particular meeting or event, workshops and classes, etc.
Shoalhaven City Council encourages local communities to display their community information on the screens — They are 100% available for you to use.
To apply to have your community information hosted on the screens, please fill out the form below: