Track the Australian Fires with Google

F My Life: It's Funny, It's True, Except When It Happens to You

: Image via CrunchBase

Our hearts go out to all those affected by the terrible fires sweeping across Australia this weekend.

Google has put together a Flash map listing the latest information on current fire locations and their status from the Country Fire Authority (CFA). This map is being updated in real-time from the CFA website via an RSS feed.

Hopefully, this map is helpful, not only to the people who are being affected, but also to emergency services personnel. It should help take the load off of other websites which are being swamped at the moment.

To explain the map, the number in each marker shows the number of fires at the location. A green marker means the area is called "safe" by the CFA. Yellow means "controlled". Orange means "contained". Red means "going".

Google will be updating the map on an ongoing basis.

There's a lot of additional information on the web about the location and status of fires and road closures, and what to do to keep safe. Due to traffic load, please only visit the first three sites below if your personal safety is potentially impacted by the fires.

The Department of Sustainability and Environment has more information on major fires on public land.
The CFA have incident reports (this is the source for the Flash Map)
VicRoads has information about road closures.
V-Line has information about rail closures.
The teams at news.com.au and theage.com.au have created useful My Maps on Google Maps, containing news and information about major fires and casualties.