We’ve created an automated Telegram channel, Fire News Alerts Greece, which sends real-time notifications about new wildfires and de-escalations of active fire fronts, as they are recorded on the Hellenic Fire Service’s website.
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In Greece, the daily news agenda during the summer often consists of covering wildfires that break out in various parts of the country and can, within minutes, upend the news cycle of the day. In such cases, one of the most common “challenges” for a newsroom is the speed with which it can relay the latest information about a new fire front, the downgrading of an existing one, and so on. To provide immediate updates on the latest developments regarding wildfires, iMEdD has created an automated Telegram channel, Fire News Alerts Greece, where new outbreaks — as well as developments on already active fire fronts — are published in real time.
The data comes from the active incidents webpage of the Hellenic Fire Service, where information is posted on forest and urban fires, as well as on assistance operations undertaken by the Fire Service across the country.
The rationale behind the creation of Fire News Alerts Greece is to inform journalists and newsrooms about a new fire front as quickly as possible. It should be noted, however, that the Hellenic Fire Service’s website does not rank fire fronts by intensity, nor does it provide data on the forces deployed.
How the channel works
The data made publicly available on the website is “read,” around the clock by a program (code written in Google Apps Script) that we created. The data is recorded in a Google Sheets spreadsheet and sent immediately to the Fire News Alerts Greece channel on Telegram whenever there has been any new development concerning wildfires — whether it is a new outbreak or the downgrading/end of a previous one. If there have been no changes, the channel is not updated and remains as is.
On its website, the Hellenic Fire Service categorizes fire incidents into four different groups:
- In progress
- Partially contained
- Fully contained
- Ended
The messages posted on Fire News Alerts Greece arrive as notifications on the user’s mobile phone or browser. At the top of each message, the new outbreaks/changes that have occurred are listed, while at the bottom appears the overall picture, as recorded on the Hellenic Fire Service’s website.
In the “overall picture,” only fires that are “in progress” are listed, in order to save space, and the data consists of five elements:
- the region
- the municipality
- the locality
- the type of terrain where the fire is burning (forest, agricultural land, etc.)
- the approximate start time of the incident (based on the moment the recorded incident was detected by our program). If the day has changed, the start date is also indicated.
To further limit the size of the messages, the type of terrain within the “overall picture” is indicated with an emoji. Below are the emojis that appear most frequently:
| FOREST | 🌲 |
| FOREST LAND | 🌳 |
| GRASSLAND | 🌱 |
| AGRICULTURAL LAND/ CROP RESIDUES | 🌾 |
| GARBAGE DUMPS/ WASTE DISPOSAL SITES | 🗑️ |
| OPEN COUNTRYSIDE / REEDS/ MARSHES | 🏞️ |
| WASTELAND | 🏜️ |
Observations worth knowing
Some fires appear to start and end at the same moment due to a change in certain of their details. For example, on June 8, the fire in Loutraki, Attica, which had been burning for many hours, appeared to end because of a change made to its record: it had initially been listed under the terrain type “forest” and was modified to “forest land” roughly two hours after it began.
Sometimes, fires of greater intensity continue to be listed on the website as “in progress” or “partially contained” many hours after they start, even if they have been reported as ended by journalistic sources.
The pipeline for collecting the data and updating the channel
The data is gathered in a Google Sheets spreadsheet through code written in Google Apps Script. The latter is a cloud-based platform for writing and running JavaScript code, supported by Google Drive. Google Apps Script allows the integration and automation of tasks in Google products, including spreadsheets.
In this case, with the help of Claude, we wrote JavaScript code that performs the following main tasks:
- It collects the data from the Fire Service’s website — specifically from the application https://www.fireservice.gr/apps/fire2019/symvanta/page.php, which is embedded in the Hellenic Fire Service’s website.
- It sorts the incident data by category (wildfires, urban incidents, assistance operations) and according to their status.
- It records the data in separate sheets of the Google Sheet, one for each incident category.
- For wildfires, it detects changes between the latest data “snapshot” (the most recent data it recorded) and the immediately preceding one each time. This step is one of the most important parts of the pipeline, so that ultimately the program can:
- Send the new data, as a new message, to Fire News Alerts Greece, whenever changes have been detected in the status of wildfires in the “in progress” category.
The channel was created on Telegram because of how easy it is to set up such a one-way notification system, using @BotFather. Telegram is a tool frequently used by news organizations, especially in Eastern European countries, and is convenient for sending short, immediate messages to a wide audience. Moreover, the ability to create such a system on Telegram is available free of charge, in contrast to other comparable applications.
