New technologies are playing an increasingly important role in combating bushfires. The New South Wales Rural Fire Service (RFS) in Australia provides an excellent illustration of this with its development and initial introduction of ‘Athena’, a world’s-first, rapidly evolving and expanding, high-tech bushfire intelligence system.

Assistant Commissioner Ben Millington is the RFS’ Director of State Operations. His career includes police, disaster management and RFS service, with extensive experience in emergency and firefighting risk assessment, management and co-ordination. He is the ‘senior user’ for the Athena program and explained that the concept resulted from one of the recommendations to come out of the catastrophic 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season, when the State Bushfire Inquiry recommended as part of its post-fire season report that firefighting agencies investigate new technologies and embrace artificial intelligence. “Athena is our bushfire intelligence system, driven by AI (artificial intelligence). Athena was the Greek goddess associated with wisdom, craft and warfare. She embodied cold rationality, tactics and strategy and that’s the reason we went with the name. We contracted, partnered with and worked very closely with Australian technology company ‘Kablamo’ on this project,” he related.

As the Senior User, Millington engages with stakeholders to define system features, functionality and processes. Then comes the Senior Supplier, who is John Danson, the RFS Chief Information Officer who deals with the actual build, technology and infrastructure and below that, several working groups are involved with the various modules. Volunteers have also had input into the program, while up to around twenty Kablamo staff have been working on the project at times. “Compared to how we have traditionally managed projects, with Athena we have adopted a more contemporary approach where we do ‘sprints’,” Millington remarked. “That’s the way the software industry works, in a very dynamic, agile fashion so we define a body of work, concentrate on that and complete it in the next short period, then come back and define the next ‘sprint’. That has really helped us fast-track this and get it to where it is now.”

Two years of diligent work has gone into building Athena so far, with the first phase of the software launched to a group of two hundred RFS personnel as a trial during the 2022-2023 fire season. The fire modelling (fire spread prediction), risk visualization and social intelligence (fire story and social media) modules, although only the first phase of Athena, have already proved to be potential game-changers that greatly enhance the timeliness and accuracy of information accessible to firefighting coordinators and personnel. The base program upon which Athena is built was an existing Kablamo product, which was then modified and expanded to feature concepts and incorporate capabilities envisaged by RFS Commissioner Rob Rogers.

“This project stems from the vision of Commissioner Rogers who continues to bring about significant change and reform to the organization” he said.

Athena displays a wide range of information on a state map, sourcing data from many sources that include government, public and private inputs. Access to the API (raw data stream) from social media platform Twitter is being finalized and TikTok is the next platform whose data will be sought, as its users are largely the 15 to 30-year-old demographic who post a lot of video content. Posts, videos and photos can be geo-referenced and used as an additional intelligence source for fire information. The system will pick up posts that use key words such as bushfire, fire, smoke or RFS and the photos and posts will be flagged for human analysis. It also looks for any imagery that is geo-located near a point of interest or may be relevant and each found image is dropped onto the map and manually checked to be validated as relevant or not, with every validation working to teach Athena’s AI how to assess and validate the posts automatically.

“What we’d like to get to eventually is where the system itself can alert us to fires that we may not be aware of, by monitoring and assessing social media activity, particularly where a large number of people are present,” commented a senior member of the team working on the social media module. Long term, the desire is to have a web resource such as the ‘hazards near me’ website, so that public and media can feed their posts, photos and videos directly into that site and thence automatically into Athena, providing a large volume of almost exclusively incident-relevant information to the system.

All current known fires can be displayed and the system not only shows where the fires are growing in the next twelve hours, but also where any habitable properties or critical infrastructure may come under threat in the next two hours, or for the duration of the prediction period. “Those predictions are based on fire-spread without any suppression efforts and we use both Phoenix and Spark prediction software modelling to give us these predictions,” Millington advised. Those predictions are fed into the Athena system and the fire-spread prediction is displayed within just a few minutes. The predictions also utilize comprehensive weather data from actual reports and forecasts that are automatically input and continuously updated. The predictions are assessed by fire behavior analysts and endorsed as accurate or not, and the analysts can also manually enter a fire prediction of their own into the system. Athena then provides a manual list of fires and commences assigning a risk rating to each one. “Based on the predicted path, the fire status, fire behavior and threat level, it then starts using the AI to determine which fire is going to be the most problematic. It’s not the be-all and end-all; there is always going to be some human assessment and intervention but we can now use the system to enhance our decision making and situational awareness,” he elaborated.

“Because the roll-out trial was limited and during a relatively quiet fire season, the 2023-2024 season will be the first opportunity to really use Athena in a live sense,” Millington stated, and he explained that it will be rolled out to all (approximately 700) RFS operational personnel this season. “A lot of evaluation and insight will occur this season and a big part of it is training the AI, which learns all the time. With the forecast weather and fire conditions this season, we’re expecting Athena to have a good opportunity to learn quickly.” Even though the system is new and still has a lot of learning to do, Millington advised that all its output predictions so far have already been exceptionally accurate and after a successful 2023-2024 season, the intent is to expand Athena’s rollout to other firefighting and partner agencies next season. “It will never replace firefighters, fireground managers and predictive supervisors, all of whom have particular skills and knowledge, but its great benefit is that it will allow incident controllers to access the system on site and obtain accurate information almost instantly.”

Different information can be displayed by selecting from a range of available layers, enabling an overview of such data as the total area burned so far, the location of deployed firefighting vehicles and personnel – as each vehicle is fitted with automatic vehicle location (AVL) equipment that feeds status-panel data directly into Athena – the weather, the wildfire history, RFS stations, fire trails and the location of assets of particular interest such as schools, homes, aged care facilities, hospitals, airports, helipads, mobile communication  black-spots and infrastructure assets. Aerial imagery such as line-scans from the RFS’ Citation is automatically processed and uploaded to Athena, so it can then be selected for display. Manual mapping can also be entered into the system, enabling identification of such items as assembly areas, evacuation points and non-defendable habitation. Rollout of MDTs (mobile data terminals) has commenced for all firefighting trucks to enable data entry from each appliance.

 
The fire story module automatically ingests all the information and documentation that previously had to be manually located and collated for subsequent post-season enquiries or coronial inquests and includes any posts to social media by the firefighting agencies. What could take weeks, months or even years of work by firefighting agency personnel is now continuously recorded, updated and collated so that it can be printed out immediately by Athena on demand.

Millington pointed out that during the peak of the 2019-2020 season, there were 150 to 200 fires burning simultaneously, emphasizing that the Athena system would undoubtedly have provided a significant advantage in prioritizing and allocating resources. The RFS (Rural Fire Service) maintains a close cooperative working arrangement with various firefighting agencies, sharing technological advancements and operational experience. The potential benefits of Athena extend beyond its current application, as it can be adapted for use by different agencies and in various locations. Discussions are already underway with firefighting agencies for the integration of Athena into their systems. Upon successful development and validation of the system, it is anticipated that the customised product will be accessible to firefighting agencies worldwide, including CALFire. CALFire has already viewed the product and acknowledged its advancements beyond their current capabilities in fire-spread prediction, resource allocation, and monitoring.

The next phase of Athena development is well underway and includes the development and introduction of three further modules, one of which relates to aviation safety and will supplement the NAFC-administered ‘Arena’ national aviation tasking system program, which will be integrated to work effectively with the Athena software. This module is in direct response to the ATSB recommendation that the RFS play a greater role in risk assessment and safety, given that it determines and allocates aviation taskings, even though it is not an aviation operator per-se. “Arena is our aviation tasking mechanism but we have built how we do aviation risk assessment and safety into Athena. We have engaged a consultant aviation specialist, looked at and listed all aircraft on our books – whether owned or contracted – and specified their operating parameters,” Millington explained.

The system looks at all the available weather data and the fire conditions to provide an assessment of what the minimum aircraft types are that should be deployed to any given fire. “Not only will it specify a minimum classification, it can drill down to individual aircraft types,” Millington advised. “Based on multiple inputs that include all the weather conditions and forecasts, aircraft classifications and environmental conditions such as smoke modelling, the system will have the ability to create a risk assessment and send safety notifications to the air desk and to aircraft operators. It will give us red, amber or green operating environment ratings and the pilots can use that as part of their task acceptance or rejection process. We’re using systems to help us with situational awareness and to make decisions. It also assists us with some of our non-aviation personnel as much of it is relevant to them too. It augments the RFS’ capabilities so it will be extremely beneficial to airbase managers and the like having access to this sort of system.” It is hoped that the first iteration of the aviation safety module will go live in October-November 2023.

The remaining modules are the risk response engine and the fire modelling and dynamic coverage module. “Based on fire activity and where we have appliances across the state, the system identifies coverage gaps. Then it also assesses and recommends a weight of attack, based on the fire conditions, the availability of firefighting resources and the previously agreed business rules for minimum response levels specified by each RFS district,” outlined Millington. That recommendation includes the minimum number and classification of appliances, as well as the number and type of aircraft required for an effective response. With limited resources spread over a large area, there will always be a need for human assessment and prioritizing of course, but with Athena’s timely and accurate information on hand, those human decisions can be made far more quickly and with much greater confidence.

Many RFS firefighters are volunteers who used to be contacted by pager. This meant that for a significant period, the number responding to a callout was uncertain. Callouts are now notified by a push-notification through an app’ on their phones called RFSActiv, to which they reply with either a thumbs-up or -down. The Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system then knows not only how many are responding, but it also calculates the time it will take for them to reach the station, based on the location of their phone when they respond. If insufficient numbers have responded, the system can then report that further personnel will be required from the closest adjacent station(s). Cellphone location will eventually also allow systems such as Athena to track and display the location of individual firefighters on the fireground, a major benefit for incident monitoring that will greatly increase safety.

When Millington returned from a study tour to the USA, he recommended developing an electronic flight-risk assessment tool, complemented by a geo-spatial aviation risk visualizer to help identify where air operations are high risk, available to the air-desk and the pilots. The risk response engine is the result of that recommendation and considers such factors as aircraft type, topography and mission weather (icing, turbulence, lightning, windshear, visibility and thunderstorms). The generated report shows the prevailing weather variables and the full aircraft tasking history and the system also allows the selection of individual data sources or aircraft to enable the display of more complete information.

While the current plan consists of the six modules already built or being introduced, Millington acknowledges that further modules will undoubtedly be developed over time as additional ideas and concepts arise. Although much of the world may be cautious of AI, the RFS’ willingness to fully embrace it and other new technologies has resulted in Athena’s creation, a one-of-a-kind AI-empowered tool for firefighting agencies that will be a genuine game-changer. The RFS team have done the hard work of bringing Commissioner Rogers’ brainchild to fruition and Millington commented in closing, “We’re staying tight-lipped on it at the moment but when we get Athena Mk-II out, people are just going to go ‘Wow!’ This will be a game-changer for everyone but we’re taking the walk-crawl-run approach as we don’t want to release anything that hasn’t been tried and tested. Artificial intelligence will play a significant role, not just in aviation but across the entire firefighting gamut and we need to leverage off that technology.”