Why FireTech?
The fact that our near miss happened a full four months before the "normal" bushfire season, after an unseasonally long dry spell, is indicative that bush fire conditions are becoming more prevalent and the risk to regional communities is growing in lockstep.
The fires razed the bushland surrounding Peregian Beach and came within 100m of our Digital Hub - only the heroic efforts of a team of 300 firefighters prevented the raging inferno wiping out hundreds of homes, shops and businesses.
As tech geeks we of course wanted to understand what role technology played in the emergency response and so we spent time debriefing with key players in the response effort to get an inside view. What we learned was that a bushfire emergency involves a set of highly dynamic and complex problem spaces from firefighting to public communications to evacuation management.
Many of these problem spaces are ripe for innovative solutions that use some of the powerful technology platforms available to us in 2019, including drones, computer vision, predictive analytics, autonomous vehicles, robotics, near-realtime satellite imagery, IOT systems, social media, etc. We call this category of tech innovation FireTech.
Firetech is not only a relevant subject for us here in Noosa, indeed most regional areas of Australia and many regions in the USA and Europe also face a growing risk of catastrophic bushfires. We believe that as these risks grow, it will result in massive global demand for FireTech.