Filter CFA incidents by region


With all the focus on bushfires in Victoria and the close proximity to my house of some of those fires, I’ve been checking the Country Fire Authority (CFA) website to see what is going on in the area. The CFA are kind enough to provide a RSS feed of all incidents, but I don’t really need to know all incidents in all Victoria, just the ones near me.

So, time to play with Yahoo! Pipes … which I’ve been waiting for an excuse to try. A few minutes hacking around (no, really, it’s very quick-and-dirty), and voila! a pipe that takes your CFA region as input and returns incidents in that region, less the false alarms.

You can find your CFA region (hint, not for people in the main metro area) at: http://www.cfa.vic.gov.au/incidents/definitions/region.htm

To use the pipe, head over to CFA by Region and enter your region number in the field and hit run pipe. Easy. You can then grab the RSS feed from the pipe to use in your favourite reader, or use the Yahoo! alerts to e-mail new entries to you. Sadly the SMS alert feature does not appear to be available in Australia, otherwise we’d have the suggested warning system all set.

If anyone can think of improvements, let me know, or you can just clone it and create your own pipe. Enjoy.