Finding Fires

Date: 9 July 2008

The New Zealand Fire Service relies on many other organisations to supply geospatial information for use in fire operations and fire management. At incidents, the quality and availability of spatial information affect the performance and safety of operational staff.

Spatial datasets are also managed internally. Large-scale national datasets of roads, addresses and place names are primarily used for locating an incident in order to dispatch resources. A lot of effort goes into ensuring the quality and accuracy of this data, for example:

• cadastral and topographic datasets are used to establish Fire Authority jurisdiction

• road data is used to establish optimal sites for fire stations

• demographic data is used to establish relationships between people and incidents (then recorded spatially)

• weather data is collected and modelled for presentation in map form over the Internet each day

• a national Wildfire Threat Analysis methodology requires organisations to operate collectively to carry out this spatial analysis project within their region.

Within the Fire Service, geospatial information is provided to staff by an internal web-based mapping system and published cartographic products. Analysts carry out modelling, research and system development with some specialists maintaining data.