Every Australian emergency data feed, and what it costs you to use it

The data is public. That is not the hard part. Each state runs its own system: some publish GeoJSON, some GeoRSS, some ArcGIS REST, some RSS with custom XML, some CAP-AU (Common Alerting Protocol, Australian Profile). Field names differ. Coordinate order differs. Some return epoch timestamps in local time and some in UTC, and nothing in the response tells you which.

National coverage means writing and maintaining a parser for every feed. When a state changes its API, which happens without notice, your parser breaks and you find out from your users. That is weeks of integration work before you build anything of your own, and then it is ongoing maintenance forever.

This guide documents every feed so you can decide, with the real numbers in front of you, whether to build that yourself or use a unified API like EmergencyAPI.

Generated from our feed registry rather than typed by hand, so it cannot drift from what we poll. "Custom parser" means the feed has no standard shape and needs bespoke code, which is worth knowing before you commit to building it yourself.

Each jurisdiction has its own guide with the full feed table, the exact timestamp format and the integration notes. The short version:

The NSW Rural Fire Service publishes the same major incidents twice: once as GeoJSON for speed, and once as CAP-AU carrying polygon boundaries, severity, fuel type and fire size. Warnings sit on a third feed, and floods, storms and rescues live with the SES on a fourth. The GeoJSON is well structured, but the timestamps use a 12-hour AM/PM format in local time, and alert levels use NSW-specific terminology that does not map onto other states.

Full NSW feed guide

Victoria is the only state where one feed genuinely covers everything. EMV's OSOM feed carries fire, flood, storm, rescue and hazmat through a single GeoJSON endpoint, updating every minute. Fire area boundaries, SES incidents, flood observations and CFA fire danger ratings each sit on their own feed. Timestamps are DD/MM/YYYY in local time, so parsing has to handle both AEST and AEDT.

Full VIC feed guide

Queensland publishes from its dispatch system rather than a fire-only feed, so structure fires, rescues, road crashes and hazmat arrive alongside bushfires. Bushfire alerts and EMQ's storm, flood and cyclone warnings are separate. The timestamp format is the oddity: a compact UTC string like 20260406040300, unusual among Australian feeds and needing its own parser.

Full QLD feed guide

SA has more feeds than any other state. Three agencies publish through SAFECOM on ArcGIS REST, and four community-decoded pager feeds add dispatch-level detail with exact street addresses and unit callsigns. The biggest trap in the country lives here: the MFS and SES feeds return epoch milliseconds in Adelaide local time rather than UTC, so treating them as UTC puts every timestamp 9.5 to 10.5 hours into the future.

Full SA feed guide

WA is the only state you cannot simply call. Incidents come through SLIP, which needs a free account, membership of a restricted user group, and an Esri token renewed yearly. Three further SLIP layers carry incident, warning and total fire ban polygons. Warnings are public CAP-AU. Same local-time epoch problem as SA, except Perth has no daylight saving, so the offset is always exactly 8 hours.

Full WA feed guide

Four feeds in four formats: TasALERT incidents over RSS, TFS fire data as KML, TasALERT warnings as CAP-AU, and warning zone polygons from Land Tasmania on a different host entirely. The catch is that the event type is not a field. It is embedded in the description text as something like "TYPE: Structure Fire", so it takes regex extraction to recover.

Full TAS feed guide

The ESA publishes a GeoRSS incidents feed and a richer JSON feed carrying roughly four times the volume, including ambulance responses and hazard reduction burns. The quiet trap: ACT returns coordinates as strings in [lat, lng] order, the reverse of the GeoJSON standard. Miss it and every Canberra incident maps to the wrong place.

Full ACT feed guide

One JSON feed covers the whole territory, and it is the simplest integration in the country: NT is one of the few publishers using standard ISO 8601 timestamps. The trade-off is depth. Metadata is thin compared with other states and incident type naming is inconsistent.

Full NT feed guide

Geoscience Australia

Earthquakes nationally, magnitude 2.0 and above, over WFS. Authoritative, well structured, and one of the few sources using standard ISO timestamps.

Digital Earth Australia

Satellite fire detection from AHI/Himawari-8, VIIRS and MODIS, which sees fires before ground reporting does. High volume, more than 60,000 detections a day, so confidence filtering is not optional.

Bureau of Meteorology

Severe weather warnings over a WMO CAP feed covering floods, wind, thunderstorms, frost and surf. We do not republish it: the commercial licence position needs to be settled first, and we would rather say that than quietly ingest it.

Timestamps

Every state is different. NSW uses 12-hour AM/PM. QLD uses compact UTC. SA and WA return epoch milliseconds in local time. VIC uses DD/MM/YYYY. ACT uses "DD Mon YYYY HH:MM:SS.mmm". Only NT and Geoscience Australia use ISO 8601.

Coordinates

Most feeds use WGS84, but order varies. GeoJSON is [lng, lat]; ACT returns [lat, lng] as strings. ArcGIS feeds use a different geometry structure again and need converting.

Event type naming

There is no shared taxonomy. NSW says "Bush Fire", QLD says "BUSHFIRE", VIC says "fire", SA uses numeric codes. Normalising these takes a lookup table covering more than 100 raw values, and it grows every time an agency invents a new label.

Reliability

Government feeds go down without notice, and they are maintained by small teams on varied infrastructure. Anything production-grade needs retry logic, circuit breakers and stale detection, which is work you do not see coming when you start.

We normalise all 34 feeds into one GeoJSON schema: consistent field names, ISO 8601 UTC timestamps, [lng, lat] coordinates, one event taxonomy. One integration covers the country. The parsing, timezone conversion, coordinate swapping, retry logic and stale detection are ours to maintain, not yours.

PostGIS spatial clustering then groups nearby incidents into events with boundary polygons, affected suburbs and generated summaries, so 300 satellite hotspot dots become one fire event across 2,400 hectares and six suburbs.