ZDNet has an article about the information technology (IT) for the New South Wales (NSW) State Emergency Service (SES), and how it uses technology to handle emergencies, with mainly volunteer staff. Amazing stuff.

The SES is powered by 1200 desktops, laptops and netbook devices; 20 servers; 450 mobile broadband cards from Telstra and Optus; 250 network sites, complete with routers, switches, printers and UPS units; 4000 radios; 2000 fixed phones; 1000 mobile phones; 2000 pagers; and 170 satellite phones.
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The service’s busiest day came on 9 June 2007, when the SES was hit by 10,701 website visits and 550 requests for assistance every hour (one every 7.2 seconds), and one web-contact email every 36 minutes.

Read the article for more details of this service, and how they use technology to help the State cope with emergencies. That now includes hosting their website on Amazon cloud services, to enable them to be elastic under varying conditions.