NSW RFS Major Incidents Feed

What you can build

• Hold deliveries into a council area with an active fire

  Match order postcodes to COUNCIL AREA and to fire polygons and propose a hold on affected deliveries, with the alert level shown, for a person to confirm.

  With Weather Hold

• Notify a site when an incident enters its radius

  When an incident point or polygon falls inside a site's watch radius, draft a notice with alert level, status and UPDATED time for the site lead to send.

  With Severe Weather Notice

• Stand up an evacuation roster

  On a new incident near a site, pull the people on shift from the schedule and propose the roster and contacts for a person to confirm.

  With Evacuation Roster

• Re-sequence field visits around incidents

  Compare the day's visit list with incident polygons and propose a new order that avoids affected areas, for a dispatcher to approve.

  With Route Resequence

Requirements

• Site, store or delivery-area coordinates in New South Wales to match against incident points and polygons
• A parser for the description string, since STATUS, SIZE and RESPONSIBLE AGENCY are HTML-separated text, not JSON fields
• Attribution to the State of New South Wales (NSW Rural Fire Service) under the Creative Commons Attribution licence on Data.NSW
• Polling on the 30-minute update cycle rather than on every request

Authentication

No key. The three feed URLs answer public GET requests; the JSON response sets Cache-Control max-age=30, must-revalidate.

Limits

• The structured fields live inside the description text; the JSON properties are title, link, category, guid, pubDate and description
• Incident information is updated every 30 minutes, so a feature can lag the ground by that long
• The feed covers current incidents only; there is no history endpoint in the feed itself
• The rfs.nsw.gov.au documentation pages sit behind a browser challenge; the feed URLs themselves do not

Questions and answers

How often does the feed update?

Data.NSW states incident information is updated every 30 minutes. The RSS channel sets ttl to 60, and the JSON response carries Cache-Control: max-age=30, must-revalidate with a Last-Modified header. Poll on that cycle and compare UPDATED per incident.

Which formats are published?

Three: GeoJSON at /feeds/majorIncidents.json, GeoRSS at /feeds/majorIncidents.xml and Common Alerting Protocol at /feeds/majorIncidentsCAP.xml. Data.NSW lists all three under the NSW Rural Fire Service Current Incidents Feed dataset.

What licence applies?

Data.NSW lists the dataset under Creative Commons Attribution. The RSS channel's copyright element reads State of New South Wales (NSW Rural Fire Service). Credit the NSW RFS when you republish incident data.