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Why I don’t like the new fire ratings…

So after Black Saturday fire authorities around this country where pressured into doing something. Something the community would notice, and something that would have an impact. So it appears that born out of this requirement is the new fire danger rating.

It used to be that we had a simple to understand fire rating system

• Extreme
• Severe
• Very High
• High
• Low - Moderate

Basically all the new one does is add "Code Red". What does that even mean, it's worse than severe but so what. What does a severe rating even mean. All the ratings do is rate how controllable a fire will be should it be ignited on the day. To me, even as a CFA volunteer, "Code Red" means nothing. It just means the FDI (fire danger indicator) has gone above a certain number and that if there's a fire it's likely to turn nasty. I wouldn't do anything different on a "Code Red" day than I would on an extreme day.

Of course now that I'm in the city this is all pretty meaningless to me ATM but I hope to help out with fires if there are any around Wangaratta this year.

We don't need a more complicated fire danger system.

What we do need (which has now been deployed) is an emergency alert system. (http://www.emergencyalert.gov.au/)

The system can call landlines in a specific area or txt mobiles based on their billing address. I'm still not happy that you can't txt based on a physical location derived from the connected cell towers, but the new system appears to be better than nothing.

But the problem still is, how do these alerts get issued.

And from visiting the website I notice that the same problem still remains. All of the different agencies have their own warnings (primarily CFA/DSE) and they have them on their own sites.

What we need to do is create a singular portal for each state for fire information. The agencies need to pull together and actually give us information available in one place. I also notice the CFA itself STILL doesn't display the fire danger levels on their site. The word was this was because of some disagreement between the CFA and the BOM (Bureau Of Meteorology) over how to set the fire danger. So the CFA just links to the BOM site and you still have to go there for the information.

How hard is it for the government to aggregate this information into one place, the things such a site could do would be limitless:

• Reports from fire officers in your area
• SMS alert sign up to get fire danger warnings
• A single alerting portal that shows all current incidents and any warnings associated with them

And the whole thing could have a sign up system that allowed the user to view a portal that was just for them.

But no, what did our government do, it just made another fire danger warning level. "Code Red" IMHO is a waste of money. There have already been  a couple of "Code Red" days which seemed pretty non "Code Red" to me...

So anyway that's my rant... Started a month ago and finished today because I was a little more bored than usual...