How does it work?

The 19FIRE service is programmed to automatically perform continuous monitoring for declarations of Total Fire Ban days and Brigade callouts. When such events are detected they are processed and classified to determine which TFB district the TFB declaration is for, or for which fire station the callout alert is. Fire Station Alerts are further analysed to determine the nature of the incident, the severity and location, and irrelevant information is stripped from the message.

Another set of information collected by the 19FIRE system are the subscription details of the message consumers. Users who have registered with the 19FIRE service can select which TFB district and/or which Fire Station they are interested in. Users can change their setting at any time, and may for example subscribe to their TFB district throughout the fire season, but only to their local fire stations on TFB or high fire danger days. The subscription details are securely stored in the database. No Privacy Information is collected throughout this process. All that is needed is an Australian mobile phone number (including pre-paid) and a working email address (optional).

The information from the categorised event notifications and the subscription details stored in the database are combined whenever an event is detected. This creates a list of mobile phone numbers and email addresses to which to forward the notifications.

The SMS notifications are forwarded to high capacity SMS gateways which will automatically forward the text message to the correct Telecommunications Service Provider for delivery of the message. Email messages are distributed via the internet.