Victoria emergency alerts, on your phone
Spotter reads Victoria’s official incident feed and shows what is live near you and near your family — across Greater Melbourne and regional Victoria.
How the alerts reach you
Victoria’s emergency services publish live incident data covering fire, rescue, storm and ambulance responses. Spotter reads it and turns each incident into a card on your home screen.
The raw data is noisier than most people expect. About 98% of entries carry an operational status —
“Responding”, “Going”, “Under control” — and many carry a size field reading
SMALL or 0 ha. Spotter hides those, because a card that says “0 ha” reads as if nothing
happened. What is left is the warning level, the incident type, how far it is from you, and how fresh it is.
Should you use this instead of the official app?
No — and we say so inside the app. Your state’s official app is the official channel, it carries the formal Advice / Watch and Act / Emergency Warning levels, and during a bushfire it is the source of record. Keep it installed.
What Spotter adds is everything official feeds do not do:
- Several sources in one place. Official incidents, the stolen vehicle register and public missing-persons lists, instead of three separate apps.
- Your family’s position against the incident. An official alert tells you a fire is at a street address. Spotter tells you that your daughter is 450 m from it.
- A warning before you drive in, via Risk Radar’s repeat-incident areas.
- An “I’m OK” message on any live incident within 10 km, which tells your circle you are fine without sending them your location. The server writes the message from its own copy of the alert, so no text from your phone reaches your family.
Coverage
Victoria has Spotter’s deepest coverage, because the official source there publishes the full range of incident types — structure fires, rescues, hazardous material incidents, flooding and grass fires. That applies across Greater Melbourne and regional Victoria: Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, the Latrobe Valley, Shepparton, Mildura and the towns between them.
Spotter also imports official alerts for New South Wales and Queensland. Those are fire-focused, so outside Victoria you get major fire and bushfire warnings rather than the full incident mix. Every alert names the issuing agency on its detail screen in the app. Community reports and all the family features work anywhere in Australia.
We would rather set that out precisely than claim uniform national coverage.
Regional Victoria
Outside Melbourne the picture changes with the country. These pages cover what recurs where:
- Geelong — Geelong, Corio, Norlane, Belmont, Newtown and more
- Ballarat — Ballarat, Wendouree, Sebastopol, Alfredton, Delacombe and more
- Bendigo — Bendigo, Kangaroo Flat, Eaglehawk, Golden Square, Strathdale and more
- Latrobe Valley — Traralgon, Morwell, Moe, Churchill, Newborough and more
Bushfire season
Through a Victorian summer it gets busy, and distance is what makes it usable. Spotter shows the nearest live incident within 10 km on the home headline, and keeps the full history so you can see what has been running near a saved place over the past days rather than only what is on screen right now.
Area Insights draws the same data as a heat map, which is the honest way to look at a pattern over time — it shows where reports have clustered, without pretending to predict where the next one will be.
Spotter is not an emergency service. In an emergency, always call 000. Spotter does not replace your state’s official emergency app — it reads the same official data and puts it next to your family’s safety in one app, so you are not checking four sources at once.
Get Spotter
Free on iOS and Android. Search “SpotterApp” in either store.