Spotter › Blue Mountains

Fire alerts for The Blue Mountains

Live fire incidents near you across the Blue Mountains, Hawkesbury and Lithgow local government areas, and your family’s position against them. Fire only — read what is and is not covered before you rely on it.

Knowing where your people are, on the day it matters

Residents here do not need to be told that fire is a risk; it is the defining fact of living in the mountains. What is genuinely hard on a bad day is knowing where everyone is when the highway is cut, phones are busy and coverage is poor.

If someone in your circle is within 1 km of a live incident, that becomes the top card with a one-tap “Are you OK?”. The reply sends no location and the message is written by the server, so it is a very small thing to send on a bad connection. And the alert history is kept, so you can look back at what has been running near home over several days rather than only what is on screen.

The Blue Mountains and fire

The Blue Mountains are not a town with bush nearby. They are a ribbon of towns strung along a single ridge, with a World Heritage wilderness falling away on both sides, roughly 60 to 110 km west of Sydney. Springwood, Winmalee, Faulconbridge, Lawson, Katoomba, Leura, Blackheath and Mount Victoria sit one after another on the Great Western Highway, and for most of them that highway is the only way out.

What tends to happen here

That geography is the hazard. Bush on both sides, steep country, a single road, and houses backing directly onto the escarpment. On 17 October 2013 two fires — one at Winmalee and Yellow Rock, one at Mount Victoria — destroyed about 200 homes across the mountains in a day. The Linksview Road fire at Springwood accounted for most of them.

Spotter shows what is live near you across the Blue Mountains, Hawkesbury and Lithgow local government areas — including Katoomba, Leura, Blackheath, Springwood, Winmalee, Faulconbridge, Hazelbrook, Lawson, Wentworth Falls, Glenbrook, Blaxland, Mount Victoria, Medlow Bath, Bullaburra and Woodford — ordered by how close it is rather than by when it was filed. When nothing is live nearby it says “Nothing reported near you”, never that you are safe.

Getting around

A large share of residents commute to Sydney on the Blue Mountains line or the highway, so on a bad day the household is often split between the mountains and the city, with patchy mobile coverage in between. That is the gap arrival notices and the family map exist to close.

The family side works everywhere

Which official feeds Spotter carries varies by state. The family features do not: the map, saved places, arrival notices for Home, School and Work, the one-tap check-in and the “Are you OK?” message work anywhere in Australia. Every connection needs mutual approval, you can pause sharing or switch to an approximate suburb-level position at any time, and removing someone takes effect immediately without telling them.