:fire: nsw-rfs-geojson-feeds

The NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) publishes a GeoJSON feed of major incidents and a JSON feed of hazard reduction burns, this project aims to make these feed more developer friendly.

NSW RFS Current Incidents and Hazard Reduction data is © State of New South Wales (NSW Rural Fire Service). For current information go to www.rfs.nsw.gov.au. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Where is it used?

This project is used at www.beyondtracks.com to provide information about bushfires and hazard reduction burns, appearing as alerts for affected walks and on the map.

Project Structure

This project provides Node modules to build this processing into an existing Node script:

• src/majorincidents.js
• src/hazardreduction.js

Alternativly command line programs are provided for other environments.

Usage

Install the Node dependencies with:

yarn install

Run the command line programs with:

./bin/nsw-rfs-majorincidents-geojson nsw-rfs-majorincidents.geojson
./bin/nsw-rfs-hazardreduction-geojson nsw-rfs-hazardreduction.geojson

This will download the upstream feeds, process them and save the resulting GeoJSON files.

Alternatively if you've pre-downloaded an upstream feed you can run:

./bin/nsw-rfs-majorincidents-geojson upstream.json output.geojson
./bin/nsw-rfs-hazardreduction-geojson upstream.json output.geojson

Options

• --pretty-print pretty print the output, otherwise output is minified
• --avoid-geometrycollections explode GeometryCollections out to multiple Features to avoid the use of GeometryCollections (handy for use in QGIS which doesn't support varying geometry types within a GeometryCollection, see https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues/32747) (off by default)
• --avoid-slivers to try and remove narrow slivers in polygons (off by default)
• --sort=<original|guid|pubdate> the default is original which retains the original sort order, sorting by guid uses ascending order and pubdate uses chronological order

Hosted Feeds

1. https://www.beyondtracks.com/contrib/nsw-rfs-majorincidents.geojson - preview with geojson.io.
2. https://www.beyondtracks.com/contrib/nsw-rfs-majorincidents-nogeometrycollections.geojson - preview with geojson.io - processed with the --avoid-geometrycollections option for QGIS compatibility.

An archive of historical feed data is kept as a Git repository at https://github.com/beyondtracks/nsw-rfs-majorincidents-archive together with a time series visualisation at https://github.com/beyondtracks/nsw-rfs-majorincidents-timeseries.

Features

Access-Control-Allow-Origin

The upstream feed lacks the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header which means web applications aren't able to use the feed directly. This was reported to the NSW RFS on the 3rd of December 2015, and as of December 2019 the header still isn't present.

The sample crontab file allows you to mirror the RFS feed and serve it with your own HTTP server, adding the Access-Control-Allow-Origin HTTP header.

Nested GeometryCollections

The upstream feed uses nested GeometryCollections, although allowed by the GeoJSON spec, the recommendation is they SHOULD be avoided.

Nested GeometryCollections are converted to flat GeometryCollections when they include different Geometry types or a multipart geometry where it's possible to avoid using a GeometryCollection at all.

Since some downstream applications can have trouble ingesting GeoJSON data with GeometryCollections of varying types, the option --avoid-geometrycollections is provided to explode these out into multiple Features.

Coordinate Precision

Although extra coordinate precision can help retain geometry shape even beyond the capture precision, the upstream feed uses 14 decimal places, which is more than reasonable precision for Point features. Point geometry coordinates are limited to 4 decimal places for ~10m resolution, polygon geometry coordinates are unchanged to prevent creating invalid polygons.

Overloaded Description

The upstream feed overloads properties into the description field in the format KEY: Value <br />KEY: Value. These are exploded out to make them easier to machine read in applications. The original overloaded description is dropped from the output.

Some properties are parsed:

• fire size is converted from a string "10 ha" into a numeric value with units in hectares

Machine Readable Schema

Within schema/ are JSON files containing the values and descriptions for Status, Alert Level and Incident Type. These can be used within web applications to provide users more information about what these terms mean.

ISO8601 Datetimes

The upstream feed uses dates in the format 3/01/2018 5:20:00 AM in some places and 3 Jan 2018 16:20 in other places in local time. These datetimes are converted into ISO8601 datetimes assuming the 'Australia/Sydney' time zone to avoid any ambiguities in interpretation.

Winding Order

For extra assurances the GeoJSON winding order is enforced with https://github.com/mapbox/geojson-rewind.

Sorted features

You can control the order of features with --sort=original|guid|pubdate. The default is original which retains the original sort order, sorting by guid uses ascending order and pubdate uses chronological order.

Removal of Internal Shared Borders

Around November 2019 it was observed some bushfire areas were being split into multiple Polygon geometries within the GeometryCollection for the incident. Since these are purely artificial, there is no compelling reason to include them, so we attempt to remove these by unioning multiple Polygons together with polygon-clipping.

Where the internal shared borders aren't perfectly touching you can try with the --avoid-slivers option (off by default) which tries to remove slivers less than 25m in width.

ID

The guid is used as a numeric GeoJSON Feature ID.

Schema

Each GeoJSON Feature represents a major incident. Each Feature may have multiple geometries using a GeometryCollection. For example both a point indicating a rough location and a polygon showing a bushfire extent. Although so far every feature contains at a minimum a point geometry, without any documented guarantees about this consumers should accept features with no geometry or only a polygon geometry.

Each feature has a properties field as follows. Note that these vary from the upstream feed, the full list of possible values is unknown these are just the ones I've come across. None of these properties are guaranteed to be present.

Key | Type | Description | Example ------|------|-------------|--------- title | String | A short name used as the tile of this incident, given to assist with managing multiple incidents. Usually this is the name of a nearby road or geographic feature but it doesn't necessarily reflect the exact location of that incident. | Grain Valley Rd, Boggabri link | String | A URL where more information about the incident can be found. If not found the generic link http://www.rfs.nsw.gov.au/fire-information/fires-near-me should be used. | http://www.rfs.nsw.gov.au/fire-information/major-fire-updates/mfu?id=6025 link-updated | String | Datetime in ISO8601 for the when the link contents were last updated. | 2019-12-21T21:14:00+11:00 alert-level | String | Alert level of the incident, see #alert-level | emergency-warning, watch-and-act, advice, not-applicable status | String | Status of the incident, see #status | out-of-control, being-controlled, under-control guid | String | A globally unique identifier for this incident. Usually it is a non-publicly accessible URL | https://incidents.rfs.nsw.gov.au/api/v1/incidents/285935 pub-date | String | Datetime in ISO8601 of when the incident was first published | 2018-01-05T23:41:00+11:00 updated | String | Datetime in ISO8601 of when the incident details were last updated | 2018-01-06T10:41:00+11:00 responsible-agency | String | The name of the agency responsible for responding to the incident | Rural Fire Service, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service size | String | The ground area which the incident affects in hectares | 2790 type | String | The type of incident, see #incident-type | bush-fire, medical, grass-fire fire | boolean | Indicates if this this incident a fire (true) or not (false) | true, false council-area | String | Short name of the council area the incident falls in | Wollongong location | String | A description of the location of the incident | Coast Trk, Lilyvale, NSW 2508, 150.79 -33.30

Status

Status Name | Description ------------|------------- Out of control | A fire which is spreading on one or more fronts. Effective containment strategies are not in place for the entire perimeter. Being controlled | Effective strategies are in operation or planned for the entire perimeter. Under control | The fire is at a stage where fire fighting resources are only required for patrol purposes and major re-ignition is unlikely.

Alert Level

Alert Level Name | Description -----------------|------------- Emergency Warning| An Emergency Warning is the highest level of Bush Fire Alert. You may be in danger and need to take action immediately. Any delay now puts your life at risk. Watch and Act | There is a heightened level of threat. Conditions are changing and you need to start taking action now to protect you and your family. Advice | A fire has started. There is no immediate danger. Stay up to date in case the situation changes. Not Applicable | |

Incident Type

Incident Type Name | Description -------------------|------------- Bush Fire | Forest and/or Scrub Fire Grass Fire | Grass Fire Hazard Reduction | Planned controlled burns to reduce bush fire hazards Structure Fire | A fire involving a residential, commercial or industrial building Haystack Fire | Haystack fire HAZMAT | The NSW RFS provides operational support to the Fire & Rescue NSW for hazardous materials incidents MVA/Transport | Transport incidents including motor vehicle accident, aircraft incident and incidents involving a railway or railway rolling stock Assist Other Agency | Assist other agency such as Fire & Rescue NSW, NSW Police, NSW SES, NSW Ambulance, Defence Force, interstate deployments etc Search/Rescue | Search and Rescue, rescue animal Flood/Storm/Tree Down | Assisting with Flood or storm damage or tree down Vehicle/Equipment Fire | Vehicle or Equipment fire such as car fire, farm machinery fire, transformer fire etc Burn off | Burn off such as stubble fire, pile burn etc Fire Alarm | Automatic Fire Alarm or Domestic Smoke Alarm Medical | Medical incident such as medical evacuation Other | Other incidents such as smoke in vicinity, gas leak, building collapse etc

Warranty

The information in the RFS feed can affect life and property. Although the aim of this project is to make the RFS feed more safe, usable and reliable for data consumers, errors or omissions may be present and/or the upstream supplied data structure may change without any notice causing issues. Use at your own risk.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.