Fires Near Me Alternatives: Programmatic Access to Bushfire Data

Fires Near Me is the NSW Rural Fire Service app for tracking bushfires in New South Wales. It shows current incidents on a map with alert levels, and sends push notifications for fires in your area.

Other states have equivalent apps: VicEmergency (Victoria), Alert SA (South Australia), Emergency WA (Western Australia), TasALERT (Tasmania), and so on. Each covers only its own state.

These apps are designed for residents checking safety conditions. They are not designed for developers who need to integrate fire data into their own applications.

If you are reading this, you probably need one or more of these things:

• An API endpoint that returns structured fire data (JSON, GeoJSON)
• National coverage, not just one state
• The ability to filter by location, severity, or incident type
• Historical data for research or risk analysis
• Automated alerts or integration with your own systems

None of the official apps provide this. Some states publish raw data feeds, but they are fragmented across 8 different systems with 8 different formats.

Pros

• Direct from the source, no middleman
• Free and public (most states)
• You control the polling interval

Cons

• 8 different formats to parse and maintain
• No documentation on most feeds (you reverse-engineer them)
• Feeds change without notice (URLs, field names, schemas)
• Timestamps in different formats and timezones per state
• No historical data (feeds are real-time only)
• No filtering, pagination, or search
• You need retry logic, error handling, and stale detection

This is viable if you only need one state. For national coverage, expect 2-4 weeks of integration work and ongoing maintenance. See our Complete Guide to Australian Emergency Data Feeds for full details on every feed.

ABC Emergency aggregates data from multiple states into a single map view. It is the closest thing to national coverage in a consumer app.

Limitations for developers

• No API. The data is only accessible through their website and app.
• Cannot filter by type, severity, or location programmatically
• No historical data
• No GeoJSON or structured data output
• Dependent on ABC maintaining the aggregation

EmergencyAPI is a unified REST API that aggregates 30 feeds from all 8 Australian states and territories plus national sources (earthquakes, satellite hotspots). It normalises everything into one GeoJSON schema with consistent field names, ISO 8601 timestamps, and standard [lng, lat] coordinates.

What you get

• One API call for all 8 states
• Filter by state, event type, severity, warning level, status
• Bounding box and proximity search (lat/lng/radius)
• Cursor-based pagination for large result sets
• GeoJSON, CSV, and CAP-AU output formats
• 525,000+ archived incidents for historical analysis
• Updates every 30 seconds to 2 minutes
• Free tier at 500 calls per day, no credit card required

Example request

The poller handles all the parsing, timezone conversion, coordinate normalisation, event type mapping, retry logic, and stale detection. You get clean, consistent data.

If you need one state only and are comfortable maintaining a parser, the raw state feed is a reasonable choice. Check our feed guide for the URL and format details.

If you need national coverage, or you want filtering, historical data, or multiple output formats, EmergencyAPI saves you weeks of integration work and ongoing maintenance.

If you are a researcher needing historical bushfire patterns, EmergencyAPI provides access to 525,000+ archived incidents that are not available from any of the real-time state feeds.