Fires Near Me app as brilliant as Greens scare campaign revolts
The NSW Rural Fire Services app Fires Near Me has been a major factor in ensuring that the Greens’ campaign to spread chaos through their climate change propaganda has been a flop, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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At least four people perished in the past week’s bushfires, hundreds of homes were lost, thousands of buildings but it could have been worse, a lot worse.
That it was not was primarily due to two factors, the more than 2000 volunteer fire fighters who put their lives on the line and a quite amazing app.
The NSW Rural Fire Services app Fires Near Me has been a major factor in ensuring that the Greens’ campaign to spread chaos and panic through their climate change propaganda has been a flop.
Bushfires need three things to thrive — flame, fuel and oxygen.
There is an overload of fuel in the national parks because Green-dominated policy makers in the federal, state and local governments have been blinded by the tree-huggers who have chosen to ignore the reality the Australian bush has adapted to accommodate a scorching regime over the millennia.
During past fire seasons, there have been high levels of anxiety because of a lack of near-real time information about the locality of the fires.
Commercial radio and the regular broadcasts from the ABC were the principal sources of news. Not up-to-date and sometimes of doubtful reliability.
Fire and emergency services personnel were tied up answering phone calls from frantic people who saw a puff of smoke on the horizon or smelt the unmistakeable tang of burning gums. Fires Near Me has done much to relieve frontline officers of the burden of those calls.
Assistant Commissioner Kelly Browne of the NSW Rural Fire Service, the director of Information Communication Technology and chief information officer, says the RFS recognised the need for a speedy means of communicating information about fires over a decade ago.
An initial version of the app was released in 2009, which provided basic information. This changed two years ago with the development and build outsourced to the Arq Group, a digital solution organisation, which has been responsible for the app since 2017.
Now its fourth iteration, Fires Near Me allows near real time updates to be pushed to the public.
The latest release in May provided users with the ability to pinpoint a location of interest such as their home and establish a watch zone around it. When a fire is reported within that zone, the user is automatically notified.
There are over 1.3 million devices registered with an estimated 650,000 downloads occurring since Monday.
At the height of the concern, there was an estimated 7000 per cent increase in the average daily usage.
It’s a credit to the RFS and Arq Group CEO Tristan Sternson who said the sheer scale of the current fire event and the role technology has played to be able to rapidly reach large communities of people, demonstrates why robust and scalable digital platforms are essential for organisations today.
“Our team are critically aware of how important and mission critical this service is to the people of NSW, with many of our staff themselves active voluntary firefighters with the Rural Fire Service.”
RFS Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons has mentioned Fires Near Me during every press conference.
That’s the most positive thing to have come from the fires.
The flip side has been the execrable campaign run by the Greens to claim a causal link between the fires and global warming in their attempt to shut down what remains of the Australian manufacturing industry and extort more public funding for unreliable wind and solar projects.
The miserable lies and deceit in the campaign co-ordinated by the sole Greens federal MP Adam Bandt and the federal leader of the sorry little party, Victoria’s Senator Richard Di Natale, and his sidekick WA Senator Jordon Steele-John, have largely been ignored except by the Green-Left ABC and the Nine (formerly Fairfax) media.
Using deaths and loss of property to mount political campaigns is about as low as it gets — thank you Greens, Labor and the ABC.
Tying the devastating bushfires to Australia’s minuscule contribution to the global volume of CO2 emissions and the specious claim that action here can influence the weather anywhere is absolute unmitigated garbage.
But a real thank you to the RFS and to the brilliant IT specialists at Arq who have enabled thousands to get real news almost immediately about their situation through Fires Near Me app.
When it comes to making life or death decisions such as when to stay or leave, who do you trust? Certainly not the Greens, Labor or the ABC.