Best On Desktop. The 3D map is heavy for phones — try the Reports view.
■ Raising 3,000 counties…
■ NERIS Data
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Drag To Rotate And Tilt · Scroll To Zoom · Move Across Counties · Click Or Tap To Pin
In 2025 America retired its 40-year-old fire incident reporting system (NFIRS) and replaced it with NERIS — the National Emergency Response Information System, built by UL's Fire Safety Research Institute with the U.S. Fire Administration. In August 2026 the first large public release arrived: 18.7 million incident reports, updated multiple times each week.
This atlas is an independent early look at that release. Every bar is a county; every number below comes straight from the public dataset.
What it is. A county total is the number of distinct fire departments that reported at least one incident in that county. Unique department IDs — not stations, trucks, or firefighters.
National context. This atlas has about 18,000 distinct departments of America's roughly 29,000. NERIS is still onboarding.
Why Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts look huge. That is real U.S. fire-service fragmentation — especially Northeast volunteer fire companies, many of them small and independent. Allegheny County, Pennsylvania is a good example: independent registries list roughly 150–170 departments; NERIS showing about 220 is the same order of magnitude.
Why a county total can run higher than a local directory. The county count includes any department that appears on an incident in that county. Mutual-aid and automatic-aid partners from next door count, and department IDs can be a little finer-grained than a county roster. That is also why adding up every county's department count overshoots the national unique total (about 2.8×) — the same department can appear in more than one county.
Cook County (~240). Chicago Fire Department plus many suburban municipal departments plus aid partners — not “240 Chicagos.”
What it is not. This is not a fire-incidence map. For “most fires,” use the rate views — Rate, Not Volume, or color by Home Fires Per 100,000 Residents — not the Departments layer. The onboarding series (When Counties Came Online, First-Month Spike, Online But Quiet) lives in the story views too; those measures cover the whole record and do not change with the time slider.
When a home burns, the American Red Cross is usually the agency that shows up with shelter and aid. NERIS records, incident by incident, how many people were displaced and whether a smoke alarm was present — the two numbers that tell preparedness programs like Sound the Alarm exactly where working alarms are missing and where families lose their homes.
Every incident carries 45 fields — type, actions taken, coordinates, structure type, smoke-alarm status, displacement, hazards. The NERIS Data Dictionary lists every field with its real-world fill rate and what it means in plain language.
Data: NERIS Public Incident Basics. Incidents are assigned to counties by county name plus state, with a point-in-polygon fallback on incident coordinates. Failed-geocode placeholder coordinates are excluded — including 70,521 dispatch records from 6,107 departments stacked at latitude-longitude (0, 0), the infamous “Null Island” in the Atlantic Ocean where zeroed coordinates land. County population is the 2023 Census estimate. Time Range filters the map to a month span when monthly county totals are in this snapshot; all-time remains the default. Play Months steps the map one month at a time and loops; dragging either handle stops it. Displacement counts people displaced by structure fires only — temporary evacuations logged on wildfire, hazmat, alarm, and medical calls are excluded, because being asked to leave for an afternoon is not losing your home. Reports claiming more than 500 displaced in a single incident are also excluded — a handful of clear data-entry errors (one claimed 75,000; another pasted its incident number into the field) would otherwise dominate the national total. The pinned county details show how many incidents a displacement total comes from. Rendered with deck.gl.