The NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) has provided an RSS feed with the latest updates on bush fires in NSW for a while now, and it’s a geoRSS feed with lat/long data included so you can see where each incident happens. However it wasn’t until this week, when their incident and major updates feeds were included in the data.australia.gov.au repository that I noticed something else. They don’t just have a location point for each fire, they have the actual boundary coordinates included.
This means that Google Maps can create a polygon overlay of each fire, showing its size and location. I’ve included it in Google Maps, you can see it here. Each place marker includes useful information like description of the location, what council area it’s in, what type of fire it is and the latest updates.
But additionally, if you zoom into one of the incidents, you can see the outline of the location of the fire and really get a feel for its size and what property it’s near.
After the devastation of last season’s bushfires, and the fact that this season is expected to be very bad, this service is one of many tools people can use to keep up to date.
It’s also worth giving props to the NSW Rural Fire service. They’re the only fire service in the country that is providing this level of detail in their public news feeds, and keeping it updated. Additionally, as far as I can see, theirs is the only dataset on the data.australia.gov.au that is actually a live data service rather than a CSV or Excel file download. If the government wants the data provided to be used they’re going to need to provide more live data. Or at least more up to date than last years crime data.
The map below has the RFS incident feed embedded, so it will update as the RSS feed from the RFS is updates. You can click on the link at the bottom to go to Google Maps, where you can add this map to your ‘My Maps’ section for later.