A search of inquiries and investigations into the management of significant bushfires and other natural disasters has identified more than 100 examples where poor information flows and management within the Incident Management Team (IMT), between the IMT and incident responders and between different groups of incident responders was identified as a significant issue. These issues have caused differences in situational awareness between the IMT and incident responders, sometimes with disastrous consequences. For example:

“Emergency management was significantly hampered by a lack of information from the ground, and the lack of communications and situation awareness paralysed command and control.”

In addition, limited use of local knowledge, limited ability to share information between agencies, poor record keeping, difficulties in transferring complex (especially spatial) information by radio, a lack of ability to recreate incident events and the failure to use information collected at one incident in subsequent incidents are also common issues identified in inquiries into significant incidents.

Burnology | Unite has been specifically developed to address these issues and is a formal, map centric, cloud based, real time, incident mapping, collaboration and information management system for use by IMTs and incident responders – between the office and field – before, during and after emergency incidents.

This paper describes the main functionality of Burnology | Unite and the results of a preliminary trial of the system conducted during the Australian Capital Territory Autumn 2015 prescribed burning program.

Wise, C.R. (2006) Organising for homeland security after Katrina: is adaptive management what’s missing? Public Administration Review, 66, 302-318, pg 310.