Australia is consistently one of the hottest and dryest climates on earth, making bushfires a part of life. With 100’s of operators throughout the continent, creating a collaborative response network can be complicated and expensive to accomplish.
Fires have played a part destructive role in Australia’s history, but none were more deadly than those in 2009. Named the ‘Black Saturday Fires’ it is still the most deadly bushfire period in Australian history. The fires took 173 lives and burned through 450,000 hectares of bushland.
Following the destruction of land and a huge death toll, The Royal Commission into those fires noted “resource tracking is often a manual and time-consuming process. It is essential that incident controllers know the location of vehicles, personnel, equipment and aircraft so that fire management can be planned and directed and critical information, such as red flags warnings, can reach those on the fire ground when they need it.”
In response to the Royal Commission, NAFC (National Aerial Firefighting Centre), the organisation responsible for the coordination of airborne firefighting contracts, recognised the critical requirement for this advanced tracking technology, and promptly issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a real-time tracking and monitoring solution that would give state, territory and federal agencies the ability to share a common picture of firefighting aircraft.
In the late 2000s, NAFC was struggling to find a tracking solution which could service all aerial firefighting providers in Australia. A potential approach was to mandate a single tracking system and make it a requirement for all NAFC contractors to use that particular tracking provider. This idea only caused more problems. If one provider was mandated for all aerial firefighting it would force some operators to change or add another tracking service on top of their existing contractual requirements with other tracking providers.
A single provider solution appeared to be cost-prohibitive and unworkable, so TracPlus offered a cost-effective and simple solution — to share data from multiple providers yet view this data on a single screen through TracPlus.
TracPlus’ solution meant that all operators that worked under NAFC could keep their current tracking equipment, and easily share their tracking data with NAFC and other agencies when operating within the bounds of their firefighting contracts. Furthermore, these operations could be achieved with little or no capital expenditure for all parties involved.
After a six-month trial period encompassing two states, 3 tracking providers and four agencies, TracPlus was chosen as Australia’s national integration provider in 2009.
TracPlus is accountable for receiving, formulating and providing tracking and event data to all NAFC member agencies, in the formats that they require.
“A single provider solution appeared to be cost-prohibitive and unworkable, this is where TracPlus offered a solution" — Andrew Matthews, General Manager of NAFC.
“TracPlus effectively acts as a single access point for all tracking and event data in relation to firefighting.”
All the aircraft are equipped with standardised tracking and event reporting equipment, which reports into TracPlus — and TracPlus then makes this consolidated data available in a number of different ways to our customers.
"We need to do that because the customers all have their own unique systems and different data that they require," Matthews continued.
Operators that wish to secure a contract with NAFC are required to use a tracking device capable of delivering their tracking data to TracPlus via their preferred provider. Since 2010, TracPlus has provided seamless integration of airborne firefighting tracking data with an increasing number of ground assets also being integrated since 2013.
If our industry can help support better communities between community services providers throughout missions, we will see better outcomes.
Decision-makers (including community figures) need quality information and user-friendly tools to implement effective emergency management strategies. Interoperability is the ability of systems, personnel, and equipment to provide and receive functionality, data, information and/or services to and from other systems, personnel and equipment, between both public and private agencies, departments, and other organizations, in a manner enabling them to operate effectively together.
Collaborating resources and skills allow groups to develop successful strategies that they may not be able to come up with alone.
First responders come together in times of emergency to operate as one unit. Why then should technology not mirror that environment and come together?
TracPlus provides an ecosystem approach, this allows our company to provide choice and flexibility to customers. As technology providers, we need to embrace collaboration, as we know that one company can’t deliver all functionality.
We are here to support first responders, and in order to continue to do so, constant innovation is required. TracPlus realises that we can’t do everything, therefore industry-wide collaboration is needed for continuous improvement. Rather than denying people the choice, TracPlus actively pursues more relationships so we can find solutions that help people, help others.
Our partnership with NAFC demonstrates how working together is the best approach to moving the industry forward. Our teams have created a national tracking standard independent of hardware and software, and that’s something to be proud of.
TracPlus and NAFC will only look to improve our systems, working with managers in the future to make their operations better and technologies more affordable and accessible for aerial firefighting operators.
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