Postal services are probably the most commonly used methods of transferring information, but suffer from some problems for emergency services. If the roads are cut during a flood, then the postal services cannot deliver the required information. By the same token, if the desired recipient has moved location before postal information arrives then the information needs to be manually redirected, delaying its delivery. Courier services tend to suffer from similar problems of postal services problems but have the advantage that it is possible to trace the delivery of information and tend to be faster. However all of these benefits can be outweighed by the cost of delivering the information.
Facsimile machines are very convenient and are located in almost every office area within Australia.
They do however suffer from problems in their own right. Whenever information is received by a facsimile machine, the printed quality tends to be worse than the original information. The received quality can at times be so far degraded that it may be unintelligible. Noise or static bursts across the telephone line will be translated into black lines across the page which can easily obliterate any text underneath. Information that may contain vital pieces in differing colours will at best be represented by different shading levels of grey.