The new chief officer of the ACT State Emergency Service (SES), Steve Forbes. Photo: ESA.
They’re not holding hoses or laying tarps on roofs. They’re tucked away in a back room of the Emergency Services Agency (ESA) headquarters, musing over computer monitors and tapping away on keyboards.
Meet the volunteers for MAPS, the people behind the crucial ‘Mapping and Planning System’.
Formed in 2005 by Steve Forbes, who’s just been appointed chief officer of the ACT State Emergency Services (ACT SES), their job is to create the digital maps that the ACT’s firefighters, paramedics and police use to get where they need to be.
“It’s a very different model of volunteering,” Mr Forbes explains.
“We take people who are geospatial professionals within their normal everyday job – you know, they work at Geoscience Australia or other federal government agencies across Canberra – so we don’t need to teach them about geospatial technologies or making maps or doing satellite analysis or anything like that, but we bring them in and teach them all about emergencies and how to coordinate efforts to help the community.
“They come in and augment our staff in times of crisis by intelligence gathering and building products for decision support.”
MAPS rose from the ashes of the 2003 bushfires, as one of many recommendations issued by the subsequent coronial inquest to make sure Canberra was never swept by disaster in quite the same way ever again. (The same inquest recommended that all ACT emergency services join under today’s Emergency Services Agency, or ESA, banner.)
By that point, the Queanbeyan-born-and-bred Mr Forbes had been doing similar map-making work over the border for the NSW SES and NSW Rural Fire Service.
His day job was in sales, selling software to the hospitality industry.
“Back before Google Maps existed, we had to make our own maps of the local area we’d use in disasters,” he says.
Rather than go off mail box numbers, emergency services used their own “rural addressing system” which would assign a property a number depending on how far down the road it was.
“So if your address is 1000, that means you’re a kilometre down the road from the start of it.”
The finished physical map books would be distributed for all emergency vehicles in the area to stow on board.
Steve Forbes has been volunteering for 33 years with emergency services on both sides of the border. Photo: ESA.
Initially, it was the same task when Mr Forbes moved across to the ACT in 2004 to help out our local emergency services, but soon it morphed into digital maps and software.
“Fast forward to today, and we don’t make paper maps anymore – it’s all digital – and yes, Google Maps is a thing, but it also doesn’t do a good job in the rural areas, so we still have teams now who make those digital products.”
Today’s MAPS team numbers about 50 volunteers, and they’ve racked up quite a lot of “national recognition” in their time.
“I’m really proud of that volunteer group that we started,” Mr Forbes said.
“We assisted Victoria Police in the search for all the missing people from the 2009 devastating bushfires … And we were there for just under 50 days post-fire, assisting the coroner with the mapping of the disaster and searching for missing people.
“We were able to showcase – for the first time in Australia – how you can embed professional volunteers in not-so-traditional roles to assist the community in their time of need, and that led to national – and international – recognition.”
All up, Mr Forbes has been volunteering for emergency services for 33 years.
As of this week, he is the last of three new chiefs announced for the ESA’s different branches as all the existing contracts come to an end.
Earlier this month, David Dutton took over ACT Ambulance from Howard Wren, and Peter Clearly became the new head of ACT Fire and Rescue, succeeding Matthew Mavity.
Technically, it’s not much of a change for Mr Forbes, who has been Acting Chief Officer of the ACT SES since Anthony Draheim stepped aside four months ago.
Prior to that, Mr Forbes was working within the ESA’s intelligence team, “bringing together all sorts of information to help with decision support … and planning for an emergency or emergency response”.
He says it’s an “exciting time” to take on the new role.
“I guess, coming from an area that’s always at the forefront of innovation, no two days are the same in relation to technology. A week doesn’t go by where someone comes into my office and says, ‘Hey, have you seen this app that does this crazy cool thing?’
“So when it comes to integrating technology and tools into emergency services, then yeah, that’s second nature to me.”
