Mid-November 2009. Tomorrow the temperature is expected to be 36 degrees Celsius or above in Victoria. Over in South Australia, the fire level is already raised to Catastrophic under the new fire danger system. New South Wales is also expecting high temperatures too.
Those of us who were the Twitter volunteers in February and early March are already keeping our eyes on the information flow and building new resources to do a better job.
This time, the job is to prevent a recurrence of Black Saturday.
There has already been one period a week or so ago of high temperatures, so far kept under wraps by the efforts of the CFA and DSE. The alerts, prior to tomorrow, have been relatively free of anything to worry about.
Thanks to Twitter's new Lists feature, we can group those we follow and look up a whole List for a specific type of resource, be it news, CFA alerts of various types or the people we know who will do a good job. By contrast, the beta Retweet function on Twitter's web page is less useful at the moment. It doesn't RT out to third-party clients. So, it's still the standard type of retweet that will be of value in an emergency.
On the App Store for iPhone, there is now the app shown here, Fire Alerts Victoria. It is essentially a dedicated RSS reader covering all CFA information and district alerts. One drawback is that you can't retweet from it, but if you've got it on your iPhone, you'll at least have a rough idea from the CFA of areas of concern.
FireReady, now called Living With Fire, is about preparing, acting and surviving.
Preparation is crucial to avoiding a repeat of February's Black Saturday. The more you prepare, the more resources available for deciding, the better you act in a crunch. And the better you and your community survive.
That's something we all have to remember.
