"There's nothing like this, certainly in Australia."
After the 'Black Summer' bushfire season of 2019–20, NSW Rural Fire Service needed a fundamental shift in how incident information is gathered, validated, and turned into operational decisions.
Athena is a custom implementation built on Firestory—Kablamo's scalable, cloud-based intelligence platform—tailored specifically for NSW RFS workflows and decision-makers.
The challenge
Before Athena, critical context was scattered across systems, tools, and communication channels. Incident teams lost valuable time validating information during fast-changing events. Decision-making was slowed by manual collation. Maintaining a shared operational picture at scale was nearly impossible.
The goal wasn't just to digitise existing processes. It was to create a new kind of capability: intelligence, not just information.
What Athena enables
Athena's common operating picture brings incident context, activity, and risk into a single interface.
Athena provides a common operating picture. It brings incident context, activity, and risk into a single interface so incident teams can coordinate and act on the best available signal, fast.
The platform displays predicted fire spread within minutes using Phoenix and Spark models, then supports analyst review and endorsement. The system shows growth over the next 12 hours and highlights assets that may be threatened within the next two hours.
Multi-model fire spread predictions displayed in minutes, not hours.
Athena can also ingest geotagged social content as an additional intelligence source, flag items for human analysis, and learn over time from validation. The more it's used operationally, the more it refines its predictions.
Capabilities
The platform covers the full incident lifecycle:
- Preparation — Reduce risk to assets with short- and long-term hazard insights
- Detection — Identify new ignitions with confidence metrics and risk ratings
- Response — Run predictions in minutes and prioritise decisions as impacts change
- Recovery — Capture operational records of decisions, assessments, and learnings
Each capability is built as a module within the Firestory platform, with operational guardrails and human-in-the-loop validation where it matters.
Results
The platform launched in November 2022 with 200 trial users. The Social Intelligence module received a Best-in-Class Australian Good Design Award.
Looking forward
The collaboration between NSW RFS and Kablamo expanded Firestory's capabilities and culminated in Athena. It's helping enable a new era of firefighting in Australia.
The 'Black Summer' was a harsh teacher. The lessons learned have paved the way for a safer future, where advanced technology is a vital ally in the fight against bushfires.
