May 29, 2025
From Boots to Bandwidth: The Rise of the Digital Fireground
For decades, firefighting has been defined by selfless acts of heroism, teamwork, and rapid response. And while those qualities remain as critical as ever, the landscape around us is changing—fast.
Read more
Fires are growing faster, larger, and more unpredictable. Communities are expanding into high-risk areas. Public expectations are rising. And the pressure on our emergency services has never been greater. But with that pressure comes a rare opportunity: to evolve, to lead, and to shape a smarter future.
What’s happening across Australia - and increasingly throughout the world - is more than just adaptation. It marks the emergence of a new era. One defined by foresight, connectivity, and intelligence. One where we don’t just react to fire - we anticipate and outpace it.
This is the story of that shift—and why it matters more than ever.
Where We Were: Rethinking What Makes a Fire ‘Bad’
Historically, fire severity has often been judged by a single metric: size. The more hectares burned, the worse the fire. This mindset gave rise to terms like megafire—fires exceeding 100,000 acres (40,500 hectares)—and gigafire—those over 1,000,000 acres (404,000 hectares). But scale doesn’t always tell the full story.
Some of the most disruptive fires in recent years weren’t the largest. The recent Palisades Fire in the U.S., burned just over 10,000 hectares—around 0.052% the size of Australia’s 2019–2020 Black Summer or 0.058% the size of the 2023 Canadian National Wildfire Season. Yet it destroyed the homes of more than 12,000 households—nearly six times as many as during Black Summer. Its outsized impact stemmed not from how much land it scorched, but from where it burned and who it affected.
Looking Beyond Hectares: Understanding True Impact
In today’s world, we must look beyond hectares as a fire's most defining characteristic. The true cost of a fire includes lives lost, communities displaced, ecosystems damaged, infrastructure destroyed, carbon released, and the toll on our already-stretched first responders.
This evolution is reshaping the role of fire agencies—from first responders to year-round communicators, analysts, educators, and strategic planners.
The Expanding Fringe: Exposure Without Preparedness
The world’s growing urban fringe has further changed the equation. Driven by remote work, cost of living, and the appeal of natural surroundings, more people are moving into bushfire-prone areas. In cities like Sydney, this urban sprawl places communities closer to high-risk zones.
Yet proximity doesn’t always equate to preparedness. Many of these residents, often unfamiliar with bushfire conditions, lack firsthand experience with bushfires and may underestimate the risks. Research has shown that those living on the urban-bush interfaces often have lower levels of bushfire awareness and preparedness (Whittaker et al., 2020).
At the same time, public expectations are rising. Communities now demand more: more transparency, more foresight and more personalised information to guide their decisions before, during, and after an incident.
A Turning Point and a New Industry
These growing demands collided with harsh reality during the 2019–2020 Australian Black Summer bushfires—a turning point for the sector. The fires themselves were devastating, but they also brought urgent clarity. They exposed the limits of legacy systems and the increasing complexity of modern fire response.
What followed was the rise of the FireTech industry—a convergence of AI, cloud computing, spatial analytics, robotics, and operational expertise, much of it adapted from sectors like software, defence, logistics, and agriculture. This isn’t just evolution. It’s a new foundation for how we understand, plan for, and fight fire.
Importantly, FireTech isn’t about gadgets—it’s about solving real problems:
How can we detect fires sooner?
How can we see the full picture, not just fragments?
How do we support frontline leaders making decisions in high-stakes, high-pressure moments?
How can we predict what might happen?
How can we ensure we keep our firefighters safe?
We’ve learned that adding more helicopters and fire trucks, while important, isn’t enough. True resilience comes from being smarter, more connected, and more proactive. That means harnessing intelligence—before the fire even starts.
The emergence of FireTech signals something deeper: a shift in mindset. A realisation that data and digital systems, when applied with care and purpose, don’t replace people—they empower them.
And that shift is well underway.
Where We Are: From Management to Intelligence
If Black Summer in Australia and fires like Palisades or the Canadian National Wildfire Season in North America were wake-up calls, the months and years since have marked a quiet but determined transformation.
Across Australia and beyond, agencies are rethinking how they prepare for and respond to increasingly complex fire seasons. The changes underway aren’t just tactical—they’re systemic. And they represent a promising shift from incident management to incident intelligence.
For decades, platforms were built to coordinate: track trucks, log events, and issue updates. They served a vital role in helping teams manage response operations. But as fire behaviour has intensified and community expectations have grown, so too has the need for systems that go beyond managing what is happening, to helping predict what could happen.
A helpful way to understand this evolution is through the Data–Information–Knowledge–Wisdom (DIKW) Pyramid, first articulated by systems theorist Russell Ackoff:
Data is the raw record of events—GPS pings, sensor outputs, aerial observations.
Information adds context—showing, for instance, where trucks are positioned relative to a fire front.
Knowledge connects that information—drawing on doctrine and experience to plan response strategies or decisions made.
And at the top is Wisdom, or what we call Intelligence—the ability to synthesise all of the above and leverage predictive models to anticipate what’s coming, generate recommendations, and support confident, well-informed decisions.
This shift is already being operationalised in Australia through platforms like Athena at the NSW Rural Fire Service and ADAPT at Fire & Rescue NSW—both supported by the NSW Office of the Chief Scientist and Engineer through the 'Natural Hazard Technology Program' and 'Natural Hazards Detection System grants'.
These systems don’t just help responders act faster—they help them act smarter. By bringing together predictive hazard modelling, real-time resource availability, historical incident analysis, and social intelligence, these platforms are enabling a fundamental shift: from reactive response to proactive response.
It’s no longer about documenting the past - it’s about anticipating what’s ahead and acting before it happens.
Importantly, this transformation isn’t replacing human judgment. It’s enhancing it. When the pressure mounts, it’s not more data that Incident Controllers need—it’s clarity. Intelligence platforms surface the right insights, at the right time, to the people who need it. They reduce the noise and let decision makers focus on the signal.
What’s most encouraging is that this shift isn’t just aspirational—it’s already delivering impact. The NSW Rural Fire Services’ Athena has supported more than 28,000 incidents with 99.99% uptime, integrating 85+ data sources, and providing automated intelligence across grassfires, bushfires, and prescribed burns.
These aren’t experiments or pilot projects. They’re real-world systems making a real-world difference.
We are still early in this journey, but we’re heading in the right direction. Every agency embracing intelligence-led operations is helping build a safer, more responsive, and more adaptive fire sector.
And the best part? The future isn’t being handed to us. It’s being built—collaboratively, thoughtfully, and with purpose.
May 29, 2025
From Boots to Bandwidth: The Rise of the Digital Fireground
For decades, firefighting has been defined by selfless acts of heroism, teamwork, and rapid response. And while those qualities remain as critical as ever, the landscape around us is changing—fast.
Read more
Fires are growing faster, larger, and more unpredictable. Communities are expanding into high-risk areas. Public expectations are rising. And the pressure on our emergency services has never been greater. But with that pressure comes a rare opportunity: to evolve, to lead, and to shape a smarter future.
What’s happening across Australia - and increasingly throughout the world - is more than just adaptation. It marks the emergence of a new era. One defined by foresight, connectivity, and intelligence. One where we don’t just react to fire - we anticipate and outpace it.
This is the story of that shift—and why it matters more than ever.
Where We Were: Rethinking What Makes a Fire ‘Bad’
Historically, fire severity has often been judged by a single metric: size. The more hectares burned, the worse the fire. This mindset gave rise to terms like megafire—fires exceeding 100,000 acres (40,500 hectares)—and gigafire—those over 1,000,000 acres (404,000 hectares). But scale doesn’t always tell the full story.
Some of the most disruptive fires in recent years weren’t the largest. The recent Palisades Fire in the U.S., burned just over 10,000 hectares—around 0.052% the size of Australia’s 2019–2020 Black Summer or 0.058% the size of the 2023 Canadian National Wildfire Season. Yet it destroyed the homes of more than 12,000 households—nearly six times as many as during Black Summer. Its outsized impact stemmed not from how much land it scorched, but from where it burned and who it affected.
Looking Beyond Hectares: Understanding True Impact
In today’s world, we must look beyond hectares as a fire's most defining characteristic. The true cost of a fire includes lives lost, communities displaced, ecosystems damaged, infrastructure destroyed, carbon released, and the toll on our already-stretched first responders.
This evolution is reshaping the role of fire agencies—from first responders to year-round communicators, analysts, educators, and strategic planners.
The Expanding Fringe: Exposure Without Preparedness
The world’s growing urban fringe has further changed the equation. Driven by remote work, cost of living, and the appeal of natural surroundings, more people are moving into bushfire-prone areas. In cities like Sydney, this urban sprawl places communities closer to high-risk zones.
Yet proximity doesn’t always equate to preparedness. Many of these residents, often unfamiliar with bushfire conditions, lack firsthand experience with bushfires and may underestimate the risks. Research has shown that those living on the urban-bush interfaces often have lower levels of bushfire awareness and preparedness (Whittaker et al., 2020).
At the same time, public expectations are rising. Communities now demand more: more transparency, more foresight and more personalised information to guide their decisions before, during, and after an incident.
A Turning Point and a New Industry
These growing demands collided with harsh reality during the 2019–2020 Australian Black Summer bushfires—a turning point for the sector. The fires themselves were devastating, but they also brought urgent clarity. They exposed the limits of legacy systems and the increasing complexity of modern fire response.
What followed was the rise of the FireTech industry—a convergence of AI, cloud computing, spatial analytics, robotics, and operational expertise, much of it adapted from sectors like software, defence, logistics, and agriculture. This isn’t just evolution. It’s a new foundation for how we understand, plan for, and fight fire.
Importantly, FireTech isn’t about gadgets—it’s about solving real problems:
How can we detect fires sooner?
How can we see the full picture, not just fragments?
How do we support frontline leaders making decisions in high-stakes, high-pressure moments?
How can we predict what might happen?
How can we ensure we keep our firefighters safe?
We’ve learned that adding more helicopters and fire trucks, while important, isn’t enough. True resilience comes from being smarter, more connected, and more proactive. That means harnessing intelligence—before the fire even starts.
The emergence of FireTech signals something deeper: a shift in mindset. A realisation that data and digital systems, when applied with care and purpose, don’t replace people—they empower them.
And that shift is well underway.
Where We Are: From Management to Intelligence
If Black Summer in Australia and fires like Palisades or the Canadian National Wildfire Season in North America were wake-up calls, the months and years since have marked a quiet but determined transformation.
Across Australia and beyond, agencies are rethinking how they prepare for and respond to increasingly complex fire seasons. The changes underway aren’t just tactical—they’re systemic. And they represent a promising shift from incident management to incident intelligence.
For decades, platforms were built to coordinate: track trucks, log events, and issue updates. They served a vital role in helping teams manage response operations. But as fire behaviour has intensified and community expectations have grown, so too has the need for systems that go beyond managing what is happening, to helping predict what could happen.
A helpful way to understand this evolution is through the Data–Information–Knowledge–Wisdom (DIKW) Pyramid, first articulated by systems theorist Russell Ackoff:
Data is the raw record of events—GPS pings, sensor outputs, aerial observations.
Information adds context—showing, for instance, where trucks are positioned relative to a fire front.
Knowledge connects that information—drawing on doctrine and experience to plan response strategies or decisions made.
And at the top is Wisdom, or what we call Intelligence—the ability to synthesise all of the above and leverage predictive models to anticipate what’s coming, generate recommendations, and support confident, well-informed decisions.
This shift is already being operationalised in Australia through platforms like Athena at the NSW Rural Fire Service and ADAPT at Fire & Rescue NSW—both supported by the NSW Office of the Chief Scientist and Engineer through the 'Natural Hazard Technology Program' and 'Natural Hazards Detection System grants'.
These systems don’t just help responders act faster—they help them act smarter. By bringing together predictive hazard modelling, real-time resource availability, historical incident analysis, and social intelligence, these platforms are enabling a fundamental shift: from reactive response to proactive response.
It’s no longer about documenting the past - it’s about anticipating what’s ahead and acting before it happens.
Importantly, this transformation isn’t replacing human judgment. It’s enhancing it. When the pressure mounts, it’s not more data that Incident Controllers need—it’s clarity. Intelligence platforms surface the right insights, at the right time, to the people who need it. They reduce the noise and let decision makers focus on the signal.
What’s most encouraging is that this shift isn’t just aspirational—it’s already delivering impact. The NSW Rural Fire Services’ Athena has supported more than 28,000 incidents with 99.99% uptime, integrating 85+ data sources, and providing automated intelligence across grassfires, bushfires, and prescribed burns.
These aren’t experiments or pilot projects. They’re real-world systems making a real-world difference.
We are still early in this journey, but we’re heading in the right direction. Every agency embracing intelligence-led operations is helping build a safer, more responsive, and more adaptive fire sector.
And the best part? The future isn’t being handed to us. It’s being built—collaboratively, thoughtfully, and with purpose.
May 29, 2025
From Boots to Bandwidth: The Rise of the Digital Fireground
For decades, firefighting has been defined by selfless acts of heroism, teamwork, and rapid response. And while those qualities remain as critical as ever, the landscape around us is changing—fast.
Read more
Fires are growing faster, larger, and more unpredictable. Communities are expanding into high-risk areas. Public expectations are rising. And the pressure on our emergency services has never been greater. But with that pressure comes a rare opportunity: to evolve, to lead, and to shape a smarter future.
What’s happening across Australia - and increasingly throughout the world - is more than just adaptation. It marks the emergence of a new era. One defined by foresight, connectivity, and intelligence. One where we don’t just react to fire - we anticipate and outpace it.
This is the story of that shift—and why it matters more than ever.
Where We Were: Rethinking What Makes a Fire ‘Bad’
Historically, fire severity has often been judged by a single metric: size. The more hectares burned, the worse the fire. This mindset gave rise to terms like megafire—fires exceeding 100,000 acres (40,500 hectares)—and gigafire—those over 1,000,000 acres (404,000 hectares). But scale doesn’t always tell the full story.
Some of the most disruptive fires in recent years weren’t the largest. The recent Palisades Fire in the U.S., burned just over 10,000 hectares—around 0.052% the size of Australia’s 2019–2020 Black Summer or 0.058% the size of the 2023 Canadian National Wildfire Season. Yet it destroyed the homes of more than 12,000 households—nearly six times as many as during Black Summer. Its outsized impact stemmed not from how much land it scorched, but from where it burned and who it affected.
Looking Beyond Hectares: Understanding True Impact
In today’s world, we must look beyond hectares as a fire's most defining characteristic. The true cost of a fire includes lives lost, communities displaced, ecosystems damaged, infrastructure destroyed, carbon released, and the toll on our already-stretched first responders.
This evolution is reshaping the role of fire agencies—from first responders to year-round communicators, analysts, educators, and strategic planners.
The Expanding Fringe: Exposure Without Preparedness
The world’s growing urban fringe has further changed the equation. Driven by remote work, cost of living, and the appeal of natural surroundings, more people are moving into bushfire-prone areas. In cities like Sydney, this urban sprawl places communities closer to high-risk zones.
Yet proximity doesn’t always equate to preparedness. Many of these residents, often unfamiliar with bushfire conditions, lack firsthand experience with bushfires and may underestimate the risks. Research has shown that those living on the urban-bush interfaces often have lower levels of bushfire awareness and preparedness (Whittaker et al., 2020).
At the same time, public expectations are rising. Communities now demand more: more transparency, more foresight and more personalised information to guide their decisions before, during, and after an incident.
A Turning Point and a New Industry
These growing demands collided with harsh reality during the 2019–2020 Australian Black Summer bushfires—a turning point for the sector. The fires themselves were devastating, but they also brought urgent clarity. They exposed the limits of legacy systems and the increasing complexity of modern fire response.
What followed was the rise of the FireTech industry—a convergence of AI, cloud computing, spatial analytics, robotics, and operational expertise, much of it adapted from sectors like software, defence, logistics, and agriculture. This isn’t just evolution. It’s a new foundation for how we understand, plan for, and fight fire.
Importantly, FireTech isn’t about gadgets—it’s about solving real problems:
How can we detect fires sooner?
How can we see the full picture, not just fragments?
How do we support frontline leaders making decisions in high-stakes, high-pressure moments?
How can we predict what might happen?
How can we ensure we keep our firefighters safe?
We’ve learned that adding more helicopters and fire trucks, while important, isn’t enough. True resilience comes from being smarter, more connected, and more proactive. That means harnessing intelligence—before the fire even starts.
The emergence of FireTech signals something deeper: a shift in mindset. A realisation that data and digital systems, when applied with care and purpose, don’t replace people—they empower them.
And that shift is well underway.
Where We Are: From Management to Intelligence
If Black Summer in Australia and fires like Palisades or the Canadian National Wildfire Season in North America were wake-up calls, the months and years since have marked a quiet but determined transformation.
Across Australia and beyond, agencies are rethinking how they prepare for and respond to increasingly complex fire seasons. The changes underway aren’t just tactical—they’re systemic. And they represent a promising shift from incident management to incident intelligence.
For decades, platforms were built to coordinate: track trucks, log events, and issue updates. They served a vital role in helping teams manage response operations. But as fire behaviour has intensified and community expectations have grown, so too has the need for systems that go beyond managing what is happening, to helping predict what could happen.
A helpful way to understand this evolution is through the Data–Information–Knowledge–Wisdom (DIKW) Pyramid, first articulated by systems theorist Russell Ackoff:
Data is the raw record of events—GPS pings, sensor outputs, aerial observations.
Information adds context—showing, for instance, where trucks are positioned relative to a fire front.
Knowledge connects that information—drawing on doctrine and experience to plan response strategies or decisions made.
And at the top is Wisdom, or what we call Intelligence—the ability to synthesise all of the above and leverage predictive models to anticipate what’s coming, generate recommendations, and support confident, well-informed decisions.
This shift is already being operationalised in Australia through platforms like Athena at the NSW Rural Fire Service and ADAPT at Fire & Rescue NSW—both supported by the NSW Office of the Chief Scientist and Engineer through the 'Natural Hazard Technology Program' and 'Natural Hazards Detection System grants'.
These systems don’t just help responders act faster—they help them act smarter. By bringing together predictive hazard modelling, real-time resource availability, historical incident analysis, and social intelligence, these platforms are enabling a fundamental shift: from reactive response to proactive response.
It’s no longer about documenting the past - it’s about anticipating what’s ahead and acting before it happens.
Importantly, this transformation isn’t replacing human judgment. It’s enhancing it. When the pressure mounts, it’s not more data that Incident Controllers need—it’s clarity. Intelligence platforms surface the right insights, at the right time, to the people who need it. They reduce the noise and let decision makers focus on the signal.
What’s most encouraging is that this shift isn’t just aspirational—it’s already delivering impact. The NSW Rural Fire Services’ Athena has supported more than 28,000 incidents with 99.99% uptime, integrating 85+ data sources, and providing automated intelligence across grassfires, bushfires, and prescribed burns.
These aren’t experiments or pilot projects. They’re real-world systems making a real-world difference.
We are still early in this journey, but we’re heading in the right direction. Every agency embracing intelligence-led operations is helping build a safer, more responsive, and more adaptive fire sector.
And the best part? The future isn’t being handed to us. It’s being built—collaboratively, thoughtfully, and with purpose.