An emergency alert system has won the Insurance Council of Australia’s 2010 Resilience Award.

YellowBird is a simple modification to standard AM/FM radio circuitry that automatically switches the radio on in response to an emergency tone broadcast in routine radio transmissions, alerting households to danger warnings.

Developed by Canberra-based obstetrician Stephen Robson, the system is immune to power failure and is free to use, requiring only the broadcast of the emergency tone by a local radio station.

With extreme weather accounting for around 95% of the largest catastrophe events to take place in Australia in the past 40 years, the invention has the potential to minimise damage by increasing community awareness of emergency situations.

Professor Robson named the system “YellowBird” after the canary carried in cages down coalmines in the 19^th century. The birds would die from low concentrations of dangerous gases, warning the miners.

“The canary was the miners’ warning in years gone by of dangers; this is a warning system for today,” Professor Robson said.

The award, which encourages community resilience to extreme weather events, comes with a $50,000 cash prize.

The council also awarded two second place-winners: the Australian Security Research Centre’s proposal for an online self-assessment tool allowing owners to assess the durability of their properties, and the Torrens Resilience Institute’s proposed self-assessment tool for organisations to create a balanced scorecard of resilience attributes.