Fire departments provide invaluable services to communities nationwide. They respond to all types of emergency situations involving fires, explosions, rescues, medical emergencies, hazardous conditions, natural disasters and false alarms. They also respond to nonemergency service calls and good intent calls. Often, what is described to dispatchers does not reflect the actual incident type; nevertheless, fire departments are trained and prepared to respond to a wide variety of situations. To understand the fire department’s full role in a community, this topical report profiles fire department run activity as reflected in the 2017 NFIRS data. In 2017, fire departments across the U.S. responded to 26,880,800 calls as reported to the NFIRS. This count reflects a 5% increase in the number of calls reported in 2016.While “fire” is part of the department name, only 4% of runs made by fire departments actually involved fire, runs in the EMS and rescue, good intent, false alarm, and service call incident type categories accounted for 91% of all reported runs. Specifically, 64% of all fire department runs were categorized as EMS and rescue. Good intent calls (11%), false alarms and false calls (8%), and service calls (7%) were the next most prevalent incident type categories, followed by fire. This percentage distribution of runs by major incident type category is comparable to that of the runs reported in 2016. Within the major incident type categories, EMS, medical assist, and dispatched and canceled enroute calls were the leading specific types of fire department runs. EMS calls accounted for 41% of all fire department runs. Medical assist calls accounted for 10% of runs, and fire departments were dispatched and canceled enroute in 7% of calls.
How can Incident Commanders utilize Safety Officers in a Mass Casualty Incident?
