CSIR has developed a software system known as the Wide Area Alerting and Notification System to handle complex alerting and notification requirements in the vegetation wildfire domain. The system is aimed at being fairly generic though, so finds use in other domains too. This presentation describes a number of case studies of the system in use, illustrating the important requirements, before getting to grips with the architecture of and software used in the system. This presentation will describe how the system makes heavy use of several FOSS4G software favourites and relies on a small but interesting open standard, namely CAP (OASIS Common Alerting Protocol).