As LA battles wildfires, Australian official asks for extra help from social media platforms Reuters

Alasdair Pal and Jill Gralow

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia’s head of the world’s largest volunteer fire brigade said on Tuesday that the refusal of social media companies to give emergency services free access to their data was hampering emergency services around the world, as wildfires continued to ravage Los Angeles.

Rob Rogers (NYSE: ), commissioner of the New South Wales Rural Fire Service (RFS), said companies including X Elon Musk and Met, which owns Facebook (NASDAQ: ) and Instagram, could save lives by giving first responders background access to data.

The RFS manages a network of around 74,000 volunteer firefighters and permanent staff who protect one of the world’s most fire-prone regions.

Australia suffered a catastrophic series of wildfires in 2019-2020. known as the “Black Summer”, which devastated an area the size of Turkey and killed 33 people, most of them in New South Wales.

In response, the RFS commissioned Athena, a software program named after the Greek goddess of wisdom and protector of cities, which uses artificial intelligence to predict where fires might spread.

The program could be made more robust by better integrating with social media users’ posts about the wildfires as they broke out and spread, Rogers said.

However, X and Meta were unwilling to provide background information to emergency services at no cost, he said.

“We have much better tools than we had even in 2019 (and) 2020 … but certainly that social media integration remains a challenge for us,” he told Reuters in an interview.

“They don’t want to give us data.

Meta and X did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Social media platforms do provide companies and organizations with access to their application programming interfaces (APIs), a system that allows different software applications to seamlessly exchange data, but the fees involved were “beyond our means,” Rogers said.

“It’s something that’s probably bigger than us. I think it’s an emergency service problem all over the world,” he said, without elaborating on the cost of API access.

Extremely dry conditions and winds nearing 100 miles per hour (160 km/h) made the fires in Los Angeles nearly impossible to contain, Rogers said.

“It’s similar to what we had in 2019 and 2020 on really bad days, fire is going to do what fire is going to do,” he said.

“All you can do is try to protect things in front of that fire, but it’s going to burn where it’s going to burn, and when we think we have the ability to stop it, we’re fooling ourselves.”