Guide
DataQuoll is a data platform. It aggregates Australian public data that agencies publish fragmented, in formats never designed for software, normalises it into one schema, and turns it into a single view of a location: what has happened there, what is happening now, and the conditions around it. Today: emergency incidents and warnings, disaster declarations and river gauges, with an archive back to 1840. Emergency incidents cover bushfires, floods, storms, earthquakes, rescues, hazardous material incidents and warnings from 34 official sources, all in one GeoJSON schema with consistent fields, timestamps and coordinates.
One API key. One endpoint. Every active emergency in Australia. Free tier included.
Each Australian state and territory runs its 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.
DataQuoll does all of this for you. One integration instead of 27.
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.
| 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.
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.
Need more? Paid plans start at A$9/month for higher monthly call volumes and priority support.