About CBR Alerts - Why I Built This Canberra Emergency Tracker

During the 2019-2020 Black Summer, I found myself constantly refreshing multiple websites, piecing together information from the ESA, BOM, and news sites, trying to figure out if I should evacuate. The official ESA page would crash. Twitter was unreliable. The ABC was overwhelmed.

I remember standing on my balcony watching the orange glow on the horizon, phone in hand, desperately seeking clarity that never came. That shouldn't happen to anyone.

So I built CBR Alerts. A single page that aggregates everything you need. Real-time incidents. Satellite fire detection. Air quality. Weather warnings. Push notifications straight to your phone. No ads, no tracking, no paywall. Just information when you need it most.

What This Does

CBR Alerts is a Progressive Web App that pulls together emergency data from multiple government sources into one real-time map. It works offline, respects your privacy, and gets information to you fast.

Ambulance Fire & Rescue SES Police

Every incident from ACT Emergency Services appears on the map within seconds of being dispatched. Filter by agency, status, or time window. Set your location and radius to focus on what matters to your area.

Push Notifications

Get instant alerts on your phone or desktop when incidents occur near you. Filter by agency type, set your location radius, and receive alerts even when the app is closed.

Enable Notifications

Data Sources

All data comes directly from official government sources. No middlemen, no unnecessary delays.

Gov ACT Emergency Services Agency

Gov Bureau of Meteorology

Gov NSW Rural Fire Service

Sat Geoscience Australia Hotspots

Live ACT Health ED Wait Times

Live Evoenergy Power Outages

Gov USGS Earthquake Data

Live ACT Air Quality Monitoring

Features

Live Incident Map

Real-time map of all ESA incidents with colour-coded markers, clustering for busy periods, and pulsing animations for fresh incidents.

Satellite Hotspots

Himawari-9 satellite fire detection updated every 10 minutes. See fires before they're reported, with confidence ratings and age tracking.

Push Notifications

Instant browser notifications for new incidents. Filter by agency, set a location radius, and get alerts even when the app is closed.

Fire Danger Rating

Live Australian Fire Danger Rating System display. Know the daily fire danger level at a glance from the status bar.

Air Quality Index

Real-time PM2.5 readings from 3 Canberra monitoring stations. Colour-coded from Good to Hazardous with map overlays.

Hospital Wait Times

Live ED wait times for Canberra Hospital, North Canberra Hospital, and walk-in centres.

Power Outages

Evoenergy outage data showing affected suburbs, customer counts, and whether outages are active or scheduled.

NSW Cross-Border Fires

NSW RFS incidents within 100km of the ACT. Know about fires approaching from across the border before they reach us.

Incident Heatmap

7-day historical incident density visualisation. Identify hotspot areas and track patterns over time.

ABC Radio Integration

Built-in ABC Canberra 666 live stream. During emergencies, ABC Local is the most reliable information source.

My Area

Set your location and radius (1-10km) to highlight nearby incidents. Persists across sessions and syncs with notifications.

Severe Weather Alerts

BOM severe weather warnings displayed prominently. Storms, extreme heat, high winds, and earthquake alerts.

What Makes This Different

Single page, everything visible
No clicking through tabs, no buried information. One map, all sources, real-time. Designed for high-stress situations where cognitive load matters.
Works offline
Service worker caches the app and recent data. When the network fails (and it will during major incidents), you still have something to work with.
No account required
Push notifications work without signup. Your location data is quantised to ~1km precision and never leaves your device except for geofenced alerts.
Satellite fire detection
Himawari-9 hotspots show fires that haven't been reported yet. During Black Summer, satellite data often beat official reports by hours.
Cross-border visibility
NSW RFS data within 100km. Orroral Valley fire came from NSW. Namadgi fires spread from NSW. Borders don't stop fires.
Free, no strings attached
No ads, no tracking, no premium tier, no data harvesting. This exists because I needed it and others might too.
Accessible
WCAG 2.1 compliant. Screen reader support, keyboard navigation, reduced motion support. Emergencies don't discriminate.

Technical Details

For those who care about this sort of thing:

60s

Incident polling

10m

Satellite refresh

Data sources

Tracking scripts

Stack

Vanilla JavaScript ES modules. No React, no build step, no npm install with 800 dependencies. Leaflet for maps. Cloudflare Pages for hosting, Cloudflare Workers for the API proxy and push notifications. D1 database for subscriptions. The entire frontend is static files.

Privacy

No analytics. No cookies beyond what the service worker needs. Push notification location data is quantised to approximately 1km precision before leaving your device. I don't know who you are, where you live, or how often you use this. That's intentional.

Reliability

The app is designed to degrade gracefully. If the ESA feed fails, you still get satellite hotspots. If the network fails, you get cached data. If my server fails, the service worker keeps the app running. Multiple failure modes considered because during a real emergency, everything that can fail will fail.

Disclaimer

This is an unofficial service and is not affiliated with ACT Emergency Services Agency, the ACT Government, or any official body. Information may be delayed, incomplete, or inaccurate.

Do not rely solely on this app for emergency decisions. Always follow official advice from ESA, police, and emergency services. In a life-threatening emergency, call 000.

This app aggregates publicly available data and presents it in a more accessible format. The underlying data belongs to its respective government agencies.