Black Summer exposed a critical gap: the RFS was managing catastrophic fires with siloed systems, manual workflows, and data that couldn't keep pace with conditions on the ground.
Critical context was scattered across systems, tools, and communication channels. Incident teams lost valuable time validating information during fast-changing events. The NSW Bushfire Inquiry recommended new technology as a priority. What was needed wasn't incremental improvement — it was a new way of thinking about fire intelligence.
Extreme care was taken in designing Athena for the operational realities of the command centre, partnering agencies and firefighters. Built on Kablamo's Firestory platform, Athena was tailored for RFS workflows.
Architected to handle almost limitless data sources, Athena provides a common operating picture, bringing incident context, activity, and risk into a single interface so emergency response teams can coordinate and support over 80,000 firefighters in the field. The platform displays predicted fire spread within minutes using industry leading Phoenix and Spark models. To support response prioritization and strategies, users can visualize growth over the next 12 hours. To ensure rapid communications and public notification as needed, users can easily identify assets that may be threatened within the next two hours. All of this data is aggregated and viewed on comprehensive geospatial maps integrating data from government, public, and private sources, including deployed firefighting vehicle and personnel locations, weather data and forecasts, wildfire history, RFS station locations, critical assets such as schools, hospitals, helipads, and aerial imagery. After the incidents, recovery efforts are backed by available operational records of decisions, assessments, and learnings. Athena is built on a serverless architecture using AWS Lambda, RDS Aurora, S3, Fargate, Step Functions, and Event Bridge, with fire prediction engines from CSIRO (Spark) and Fire Prediction Services (Phoenix RapidFire). Recognized for its user-friendly real-time image analysis, the front is built on React/Next.js, integrating Okta SSO and Mapbox.
Athena forever changed how bushfires are managed in New South Wales. By consolidating intelligence, prediction, and coordination into a single system, Athena replaced the fragmented tools that had limited decision-making speed during previous fire seasons.
Used operationally from its first deployment, incident controllers have relied on its predictions and common operating picture during over 26,500 live fire events to date. Deployed to mobile terminals, volunteer crews arriving at an incident can receive the latest predictions and threat assessments directly on their in-vehicle screens, rather than relying on radio updates alone. As a mission-critical system, the platform has maintain 99.99%+ uptime in peak fire seasons. Output predictions have been validated operationally and are trusted by over 700 RFS personnel and its partners. This project won the AWS Global Public Sector Award for Most Innovative AI/ML, and it has been recognized with a two Best-in-Class Good Design Awards.
