Case Study 6

ADF Battery Safety Campaign

The Brief
This brief came directly from General Cosgrove, commanding the Australian land forces in East Timor.

Although it was classified at the time and never made the papers, 3 Australian soldiers returning from patrol had not studied their field manual and threw their spent field radio battery onto the Deli tip!  It exploded with the force of a grenade, badly injuring all three.  This resulted in a full field inquiry which showed a gap in training and exposure on all aspects of battery safety at both personnel and stores level.

Note: In the East Timor campaign, a wide variety of both rechargeable and disposable batteries were used by soldiers in the field, with uses varying from field radios to night vision equipment essential in controlling jungle movements by Indonesian-backed militia at night.

As experts in various print types, Promoshop® was briefed to come up with a range of Battery Safety material ranging from posters suitable for stores in tropical theatres of war to the so-called ‘vueetuee’ pocket briefs used by individual soldiers in the field.

The Execution
Promoshop® liaised with Melbourne-based Norwood Printing to develop and design a complete set of UV-fast, 4 colour process printed material suitable for all climates.  It helped that unknown to the ADF, Norwood had already developed the basic UV-fast inks and printing process to service its large plant tag business - we just needed to transpose that existing technology to large format printing.

Look After Your Batteries and they’ll look after you	Battery Identification Chart	Lead Acid	Battery Storage, Maintenance & Transport
Battery Disposal

We also developed, wrote in consultation with the Battery Safety Group and produced a complete Battery Safety online module to slot into the ADF Army, Navy and Air Force intranet to service all bases.

This Battery Safety Kit has now been introduced into every theatre of operation and we are told is currently being copied by US and NATO forces.

And that’s not the only product we have produced for the Army.  Whenever an SAS soldier in Afganistan drinks a cup of coffee from his standard issue metal travel mug, he can thank Promoshop® it has a close-fitting lid to keep the sand out!  We supplied these free of charge.