There’s a new sound in the smoky air. It’s the Hazards Near Me app notification on my mobile phone, and it’s ringing in a new national approach to disaster warnings.
It has been four years since the 2019-20 bushfires and the Australian landscape is almost as tinder-dry as it was then. There are fires burning across the east coast, including in the northern New South Wales region of New England where I live. I can’t decide whether this new software sounds like the chime of a dull bell or an electronic water droplet from a 1980s video game.
But it’s a welcome addition to the soundscape. My phone has been chiming multiple times a day this past week, informing me of fires within a 50km radius of my home at Deepwater, between Glen Innes and Tenterfield.
I’ve configured the settings that way, because when I smell or see smoke I want to know everything.
Sometimes the chimes come in a row, most often in the morning before I turn on the news. They echo on my husband’s phone but we’re learning to accept this daily cacophony as a timely update direct from our emergency services.
Very often this tuneless electronica means a series of fires have been downgraded, according to the new Australian Fire Danger Rating System. Other times, a lone chime signals that a blaze in our warning zone has escalated. Discordant trills might cut through work and other plans we’ve made for the day but this new system already feels like a vast improvement on the sense of powerlessness that black summer delivered – especially, as happened this week, it tells us an out-of-control fire has ignited just a few kilometres from our home.
During similar circumstances in the 2019-20 summer, I trawled through multiple online sources trying to piece together a picture of the three major fires that encircled our town. That season the NSW Rural Fire Service app, then called just Fires Near Me, took a long time to update. It was hard to see how fast a fire was spreading, and in which direction or how far. More often than not I stood on our front deck and looked to the smoke-filled skies because, ironically, they delivered a clearer picture.
But this week, with several fires encircling Deepwater since Friday, the upgraded Hazards Near Me app appears to be delivering enough detail to keep the community well informed. Of course it’s only as good as mobile signal allows, which is not always great in the bush. It’s part of a new emergency messaging system for fires, floods and public safety crises announced in May by the federal emergency services minister, Murray Watt.
It’s too early to know how well the system worked when, with incredible speed and ferocity, bushfires burned vast chunks of the region directly to our north this week around the border towns of Jennings-Wallangarra between NSW and Queensland, and beyond to Warwick. Four years ago, such interstate blazes didn’t show on the NSW app but the new version is covering the entire cross-border situation.
Border communities have a love/hate relationship with the invisible lines that separate us. Very often we have family on both sides and regularly cross to do business and travel for medical appointments, so when bushfires happen on either side of our state border they impact communities up and down the New England Highway that links us.
In February 2019, while driving south from a work meeting west of Toowoomba, a large fire was burning along the border in the ridges above Wallangarra-Jennings. As I arrived at the crossing – marked by little more than a bend in the road and a sign for the first pub in NSW – residents were pouring out of homes into their yards and on to the streets, watching a vast cloud of smoke up in the bush.
In the wake of that devastating blaze, word went around the community that firefighters and administrators of the NSW RFS and the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services had struggled to work together.
It was barely reported beyond the local newspaper but the principle formed part of the 67th recommendation of the report released in July 2020 after the NSW bushfire inquiry, which stated that the RFS should incorporate information on fires in neighbouring states and territories into its app.
That recommendation also suggested a national emergency app be developed as part of the new national warning system.
It was reassuring this week to hear the premiers of NSW and Queensland pay tribute to the fire services of both states for their work fighting the Wallangarra-Jennings fire.
Annastacia Palaszczuk was specific about the collaboration. “I also want to thank the NSW government because we utilised their large tanker, their large plane, and that has been of tremendous service,” she told the media on Tuesday.
The QFES deputy commissioner, Mike Wassing, also spoke of “great joint operations with NSW”.
That I was able to watch the results unfold on my phone, not quite in real time but close enough, was a great comfort under smoky skies. I imagine it’s similar for the loved ones and friends of firefighting volunteers and employees working on the fire grounds.
Now that fire services have responded to some of the recommendations that emerged from the multiple inquiries after black summer, I’d like to see current (and a few former) politicians receive regular tuneless trills on their mobile phones about the warning signs of climate change.
An app for that might knock down some of the ideological borders that are blocking meaningful action.
