Changelog

Whether the Ovens is dammed and the river pool is open right now, the lifeguard hours, the slide and diving-board rules, and what the river is doing — read live from the Bureau of Meteorology's Ovens gauge — with the water-safety channel that matters after rain.

The Ovens is the heart of summer in Bright, so there's now a page showing the river's live level and flow — is it low and lazy, or up and running after rain — read from the Bureau of Meteorology's gauge in town. It reads against the river's own recent range so you can see it rising, steady or falling. It's not a flood warning: those come from VicEmergency and the Bureau, both linked on the page, with VICSES on 132 500 for flood and storm help.

The town page now opens with a drawing of the Ovens River in autumn — the town's gold and rust avenues along the water, and the snow-dusted ridge of Mount Feathertop beyond.

A plain-words guide to Bright's kerbside bins: the lime-green FOGO bin weekly, the red rubbish and yellow recycling bins on alternating fortnights, most of the township collected on Tuesday — with what belongs in each bin, and the council's address lookup for your exact street and week.

See any bush or grass fires near Bright right now, read straight from Victoria's state emergency feed, with the CFA North East rating page, VicEmergency and the 1800 226 226 hotline alongside. It shows fires that have already started — not the day's fire-danger rating — and says plainly when nothing is burning.

Bright joins Town Tools with three tools, built around the rhythms of a valley town that swells with visitors and lives with fire season. There's a plain-language air check for the smoky days when fire-season haze settles into the valley (the town's own EPA monitor is offline, so this reads a weather model and says so); a month-by-month guide to when Bright fills up and when it's quietly yours again; and a straight answer to where to go when you're unwell, in a town with good local care but no hospital emergency department.