Fire aware, fire prepare

Team Name

CV1

Team Members

Project Description

An app by the people for the people, to help prevent and raise awareness around bush fires within the community. Hosting features such as fire prevention review, distance from fire, live alerts in affected areas and links to further information.

The proposed mobile hosted app would link with notification centre to help deliver up to date alerts based on data from the "bushfire incident" dataset and from "weatherzone" to display real time information/alerts.

As a proof of concept the information was processed through excel to display colour changes. Conditional statements were used to dictate when bush fire warnings would be sent to users.The logic for the proposed app is to notify people when current local conditions are conducive to bush fires as well as providing prompts for "how to prepare your property" linking information from the rural fire service.

The above features of the proposed app will utilise accessible data in a way which will better inform and prepare the community.

Data Story

In Australia during the last 12 months over 18 million hectares of land have been burnt, over 30 people killed, more than 3000 houses lost and roughly a billion animals have perished. It is imperative that the community is better prepared for future bush fires to minimise deaths and property damage.

Our solution for the hack idea is to generate a mobile application named “Fire aware, Fire prepare” which would give alerts based upon current and future weather events for a 7-day forecast, let users know if a fire is nearby and its status whether or not its controlled, suggests potential evacuation sites if need be. On top of this the app also offers education to user for potential things they can do to help increase their homes safety against bushfires.
The aim of "Fire aware, Fire Prepare" is to minimise fire damage by using industry knowledge combined with statistical and spatial analysis to assist community preparation.

Data sets from rural fire were used to show current fires and their status whether they are under control. This information could be overlayed if more time were given on postcodes for regions to be capable of sending alerts to app users if there is a fire danger nearby.

Excel was used to analyse data from the bureau of meteorology. This is the proof of concept for the app. It uses live temperature, humidity, wind speeds and other conditions to tabulate risk factor of fires for a 7 day period from The bureau of meteorology.
Excel was used to link the websites data to a table to allow interaction with the data. IF/conditional statements and developed formulas were then applied to create "Bush fire likelihood" values based off information from https://www.ruralfire.qld.gov.au. The values assigned then changed colour based upon if conditions were conducive to fires. This would represent an alert being sent out on our proposed app.
We assumed that the average user would not be able to research and make sense of this data by themselves creating a need for the app. Another assumption made was how we tabulated bush fire likelihood based off what the rural bushfire services say.

Data downloaded from QSpatial was used to assess the bushfire risk according to location. The map provided is an example of what would be presented when the user inputted their location, with the location being Glass House Mountains corresponding to the postcode 4518. The map shows the risk of bushfire in three levels; medium, high and very high. The user can then use this to be more aware of their potential risk to fire based on their location; which will prompt people at risk areas to be more diligent with their fire protection for their home.

Further Directions – Resources, Time, Money.

The mobile application is limited by only using weather-based data and simple spatial data sets. This is heavily influenced by the available time to submit this proposed application. With more time, the app could be improved and refined.
Future revisions of the application could include more in-depth spatial datasets such as elevations, vegetation, location and spread of previous bush fires.
A dedicated weather station website could be developed specifically for the application, with additional weather data that may be relevant to bush fires.
Additional options for the application may include safe locations for people in bush fire prone locations, links to promote volunteer fire fighting, links to bush fire charities, and connecting the application to social media platforms such as Facebook.