We currently distribute free real-time fire location alerts to 1000+ New Zealanders using the NZ Fire Service's ICAD data feed, however there are a number of limitations with how this data feed is presented, which has made it difficult to develop and maintain this free service for the public. In our opinion further investment by NZ Fire to "open up" ICAD fire location data and improve its quality, will result in significant public benefit. Real-time NZ fire location data is extremely useful to New Zealanders. Each individual can now increase their fire risk awareness, in respect to their specific location requirements, and each individual can regulate their own behaviour and reduce their fire risk (for example farmers can receive relevant scrub fire alerts on near-by farms and change their actions). For your reference our real-time fire alert service is described here: http://learn.thundermaps.com/fire-alerts-nz-property-owners/ For reference the NZ Fire ICAD feed our service is built on is found here: http://incidents.fire.org.nz/DefaultHome.html How does this work? We have built a "robot" that scrapes the ICAD fire data feed and then geo-codes the location of each fire incident and then publishes alerts to subscribers via push notification to phones, or emails, or user feed updates. Because of the low quality of this ICAD data, this process is difficult and cumbersome and therefore does not provide an ideal service for users; however because we’ve already done the work, there is no doubt that the public finds real-time fire alert data useful. People keep signing up to our free service via word-of-mouth (mostly farmers and property developers), and therefore there is little doubt that the public find this fire alert service/data useful. It is our opinion that other application developers and businesses would find ICAD fire location data highly useful too, if it was provided in an easily consumable format. ThunderMaps has been able to make use of this poor quality ICAD fire data, only because we are specialists in real-time geo-data incident distribution; other developers/businesses however, are not specialists and therefore the current poor quality of the ICAD fire data-feed stops others from making use of it and the public is not as aware of fire incidents as they should be. We request three things: 1. That data is made available in an easy to consume and appropriate format for a real-time geo-data feed 2. That latitude and longitude of the fire incident is included with each incident (not just the incident address) 3. That as much 'fire description detail' is released as possible with each fire incident report (including incident updates); so that each individual can assess the incident and make an appropriate response. In our opinion further investment by NZ Fire to "open up" ICAD fire location data and improve its quality, will result in significant public benefit. Best regards, ThunderMaps

improving public fire awareness

helping developers and business make use of ICAD fire data and get this important real-time information into the hands of data consumers (the public).