Victoria to tip in $3M to spy on bushfires

Victoria's troubled bushfire alert system may be bolstered with a fleet of fire-detection cameras after a $3 million government trial announced today is completed.

Three-month trials across fire-prone areas in southern NSW and Victoria will start from next week to test the effectiveness of a system of unmanned cameras mounted on fire lookout towers.

It follows a separate private trial of 100 EyeFi cameras during the Victorian Black Saturday bushfires in February last year. The captured footage was used in the Bushfire Royal Commission.

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Victoria's troubled bushfire alert system may be bolstered with a fleet of fire-detection cameras after a $3 million government trial announced today is completed.

Three-month trials across fire-prone areas in southern NSW and Victoria will start from next week to test the effectiveness of a system of unmanned cameras mounted on fire lookout towers.

It follows a separate private trial of 100 EyeFi cameras during the Victorian Black Saturday bushfires in February last year. The captured footage was used in the Bushfire Royal Commission.

The locally developed Eyefi cameras transmit a series of capture images over Telstra's Next-G network to a base station where a ForestWatch application will perform analysis to identify smoke.

FireWatch rotating cameras, previously assessed by the Victorian Government and trialled by the Canadian Forest Engineering Research Group will also be used. Some false alarms were reported in the Canadian trial.

Twelve cameras will be deployed in Victoria's Otway Ranges and a further three will be trialled near the NSW town of Tumut using controlled fires.

The Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre will compare the effectiveness of the cameras systems and the possibility of integrating them into existing alert systems which includes telephone and SMS alerts, and updated information available on the Country Fire Authority (CFA) website

VicRoads already uses the Eyefi cameras across its incident management vehicle fleet to monitor traffic incidents on major Melbourne roads, with information shared with Victoria Police and Yarra Trams.

In early January human error saw the CFA Bushfire Information Line provide outdated information for 12 days, while the authority's website crashed in December during a day of extreme fire warnings.

Red Cross enterprise architecture and planning manager, Ken Jarnett, who is researching the systems for use by the organisation, said in a previous story there is no single solution to deliver bushfire warnings.

"The whole communications infrastructure is difficult... mobile phones are great until or if the towers burn down, hand-held radios have distance limitations, and satellite cannot work through thick smoke," Jarnett said.

"Satellite can be wheeled in, but will fail in smoke and storms, which is an obvious problem near the fire.

"It creates a situation between a rock and a hard place."