Guide

What is EmergencyAPI?

EmergencyAPI is a unified REST API that aggregates real-time emergency incident data from 34 official Australian government feeds across all 8 states and territories. Bushfires, floods, storms, earthquakes, rescues, hazardous material incidents, and warnings. All normalised into a single GeoJSON schema with consistent fields, timestamps, and coordinates.

Overview

One API key. One endpoint. Every active emergency in Australia. Free tier included.

The Problem It Solves

Australia has 8 states and territories, each running their own emergency services with their own data feeds. NSW uses GeoJSON. Victoria uses JSON. Western Australia uses ArcGIS FeatureServer. South Australia publishes pager messages. Queensland has a different schema again. Some feeds update every 30 seconds. Others every 15 minutes.

If you want to monitor emergencies across Australia, you need to integrate with each feed individually. Parse different formats. Handle different field names, coordinate systems, and update schedules. Deal with feeds going down, changing URLs, and returning bad data.

EmergencyAPI does all of this for you. One integration instead of 27.

How It Works

Architecture

A dedicated Raspberry Pi runs the Adaptive ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Engine 24/7. It polls all 34 feeds on adaptive schedules (every 30 seconds for fast feeds, every 5 minutes for slower ones). Each feed has a YAML configuration that defines the source URL, parser, field mappings, and event type classifications.

Incoming data is normalised into a consistent GeoJSON schema, geocoded if coordinates are missing, deduplicated, and upserted into a PostgreSQL database with PostGIS spatial indexes. The API serves this data via Vercel.

When a feed changes its format or goes down, the engine adapts automatically. Circuit breakers prevent cascading failures. Quality checks flag anomalies. The whole pipeline is self-healing.

What You Get

Endpoint	What it returns
`/v1/incidents`	All active incidents. Filter by state, type, severity, warning level, bounding box.
`/v1/incidents/nearby`	Incidents within a radius of a coordinate. Proximity search.
`/v1/events`	Spatially clustered incidents with boundary polygons, affected suburbs, severity.
`/v1/incidents/snapshot`	Point-in-time audit trail. What was active at a given moment.
`/v1/status`	Per-feed health, staleness, and incident counts. No auth required.
`/v1/attribution`	Data source attribution for every feed. No auth required.

Responses are GeoJSON FeatureCollections by default. CSV and CAP-AU (Common Alerting Protocol Australian Profile) formats are also available via the format parameter.

Who Uses It

Developers building emergency-aware applications, dashboards, maps, and alert systems.
Utilities monitoring bushfires, floods, and storms near substations, transmission lines, and pump stations.
Insurance companies tracking active incidents for claims triage, risk assessment, and portfolio monitoring.
Media organisations automating breaking news alerts and incident reporting with structured data.

Coverage

34 feeds across every Australian state and territory, plus national sources:

State	Agencies
NSW	RFS, SES, Transport
VIC	CFA, EMV (OSOM)
QLD	QFES (ESCAD), BOM warnings
SA	CFS, MFS, SES, SAAS pager
WA	DFES incidents + CAP-AU warnings
TAS	TFS, SES (KML)
ACT	ESA
NT	PFES, BOM warnings
National	Geoscience Australia earthquakes, DEA satellite hotspots

For the full list of feeds with URLs, formats, and update intervals, see the Australian Emergency Data Feeds guide.

Free Tier

Need more? Paid plans start at A$9/month for higher monthly call volumes and priority support.