California Wildfires integration?

Feature Requests
1

I’m not a programmer so I really have no idea how difficult it would be, let alone if it’s even possible.

I realized that my state is on fire about 13 months out of the 12 in a calendar year. Days like today I’m often looking at smoke in the sky and wondering where the fire is, other days like last night I saw posts on social media about a fire nearby my house I otherwise would not have been aware of.

It made me think that it would be super handy to have wildfire integration so that we could see on the map where fires are located, or perhaps listing off fires within a certain radius that could be seen in Lovelace and include acreage, containment, etc could then be used for automations (e.g. push alerts, light flashes, etc.) to alert people. Something like that could be potentially life-saving. The fire nearby my house didn’t end up amounting to much, but it was late at night and if it had been big, being asleep unaware of it could have ended poorly.

I’m not sure the best way of getting that data, but 2 fire maps I’m aware of are:
https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/

2

I have developed several integrations like that - bushfires in some states in Australia, or earthquakes in the US, Spain, NZ.

The key here is to find a data source that is kept up-to-date and which contains all the relevant information, in particular longitude/latitude. Easy formats to work with are GeoRSS or GeoJSON.
I couldn’t find a feed like that on the website you linked, but if you are aware or any such feed source, please let me know, and I could look into this.

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3

Oh sweet! I assume it’s your earthquake integration I’ve got running.

I’ll look around and see if I can find any exported data or API available.

Thanks!

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4

Looks like there is an API at https://egis.fire.ca.gov/arcgis/rest/services
and some documentation on it at https://egis.fire.ca.gov/arcgis/sdk/rest/index.html#/Catalog/02ss00000029000000/

2 Likes
5

Here’s the GeoJSON feed from CalFire:
https://www.fire.ca.gov/umbraco/api/IncidentApi/GeoJsonList?inactive=false&year=2020

Adding it as a generic feed via this integration works, kind of.

This is what I have in the configuration.yaml:

geo_location:
    # Add plots on map for all earthquakes within 50 miles of our house within past week
  - platform: usgs_earthquakes_feed
    feed_type: 'past_week_all_earthquakes'
    radius: 50
    minimum_magnitude: 0.0
    # Add plots on map for all active wildfires being tracked by CalFire
  - platform: geo_json_events
    url: https://www.fire.ca.gov/umbraco/api/IncidentApi/GeoJsonList?year=2020&inactive=false
    radius: 50
    entity_namespace: calfire_wildfires

When I add the feed that way, the markers plotted on the Map are named “unnamed device” and none of the useful properties from the JSON are in the popup when clicking on a marker like they are for the USGS earthquake plots.

There are a couple of geolocation feed integrations built in, like USGS earthquake tracker (which is working very nicely) and NSW Rural Fire Service tracker (which is based on GeoJSON like the feed in question as opposed to the USGS which is GeoRSS).

How would one go about porting the NSW component over to read a different feed? Where is that code even located?

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6

The inactive parameter doesn’t work though?