The Challenge
During the devastating Australian bushfires in the summer of 2019/2020, fires burnt more than 18 million hectares of land. More than 30 lives were lost, billions of animals were killed and damage bill estimates are greater than $200 billion. The scale and complexity of the bushfires and weather systems was unprecedented and it pushed people, processes and existing technology to their limits. Kablamo took on the challenge of rethinking how data and machine learning could be used to better manage, predict and prevent bushfires in the future.
From interviewing volunteer firefighters, brigade captains, fire-behavioural analysts and fire scientists and technology teams, we uncovered some opportunities to apply our expertise and experience:
- Introducing more power, scalability and AI capabilities to the data platforms
- Enabling fast integration with new fire prediction models as they became available
- Reducing manual steps and introducing new digital workflows
- Designing an accessible interface to relay information from the analysts to incident controllers and front line teams