There are good reasons for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to track fires across the country. Fires kill thousands and damage hundreds of thousands of homes across the United States each year. Collecting data on these devastating disasters is more important than ever in the fight against climate change.
But there is a problem. The National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS), the government program used to track fires across the United States, is obsolete. This tool originally relied on paper-based reports, but in the 1970s he was created by FEMA. The last time data in a new format was incorporated into the system was in 1995, when the Fire Department began tracking emergency medical services (EMS) incidents. The last technical update of this system dates back to 2002.
As a result, NFIRS is unstable and ill-equipped to study and extinguish 21st century fires. At this time, the system does not allow fire departments to share information about what caused the fire. In other words, the information that NFIRS can provide is limited. Another challenge is that only fire departments have access to NFIRS, and other safety researchers cannot access critical data, said Michael Brooks, chief adviser to the Center for Automotive Safety.
“To get the data you have to run it [and] Save it to DVD and share it,” U.S. Fire Chief Lori Moore Merrell told FedScoop in a recent interview. “If Congress asks me anything now, I have to say, ‘I can’t answer yesterday, but I can tell you about 2021.’ So you see the problem.”
The U.S. Fire Service, now serving as a division of FEMA, is preparing a multi-year plan to overhaul its approach to fire incident reporting. The idea is to replace NFIRS with a new digital platform called the National Emergency Response Information System (NERIS) announced in May.
NERIS should be technically sophisticated, including machine learning algorithms, new apps for firefighters, and a much more accessible cloud-based interface. The goal is to make national fire incident data more robust and more useful for addressing the realities of climate change.
“There are many energy transitions happening across the United States, including electric and electric vehicles. […] Micro-mobility products and all of these high-energy storage systems pose many unforeseen fire hazards,” Moore-Merrell told FedScoop. “It is also essential to be able to track the movement of wildfires.”
However, building NERIS is not easy. Only some U.S. fire departments submit data to the current NFIRS system, which accounts for only about 70% of all fires in the U.S., according to Birgitte Messerschmidt, director of research at the National Fire Protection Association. It means that it is not actually recorded. In some ways, NERIS may mean starting from scratch, as fire departments across the country will need to deploy it. Firefighters will need training on how to use the new app to share data with FEMA.
Of note, the platform will be located outside the federal government and operated by an outside contractor called the Fire Safety Research Institute, a non-profit arm of the Illinois-based safety science company UL Solutions. The technology is supported by a contract signed through DHS’ Directorate General of Science and Technology program, which provides him with $2.2 million in funding in the first year.
We also have an ambitious schedule. The U.S. Fire Department hopes to have the initial system ready by early fall, begin deploying it to fire departments in 2024, and retire the legacy program by 2025. Moomerel told Fedskoop that the program is already “a little behind schedule,” while Messerschmidt said the NFPA was “optimistic” about the schedule.
Still, both argue that a review is important. For example, new data systems could play a key role in tracking fires caused by batteries, a key technology in power grid stabilization and the transition to electric vehicles. At this time, federal statistics on EV fires are relatively limited.
NERIS can also provide fire departments with new real-time data to improve the effectiveness of their broader response. To enable these improvements, NERIS will be configured to incorporate data sets from multiple federal agencies, including the US Census (including the US Housing Census) and National Weather Service data. The system also uses IoT components and physical sensors.
But one of the most important parts of the system is a new app for firefighters. The app, also built by UL Solutions, will allow firefighters to enter information about incidents directly from their mobile phones and send the information back to the NERIS database. The system could eventually incorporate biometrics, which would allow firefighters to volunteer to share health data, such as information gleaned from smartwatches, to support firefighting safety research. The fire department also plans to use machine learning to scrutinize emergency data for patterns and inform fire chiefs’ responses to future incidents.
“If a drought is approaching, or if the weather forecast says, ‘Today is going to be a special red flag day,’ we can say, ‘There’s a high chance of a wildfire, so we might need to restructure.’ explains Craig Weinschenk, NERIS Principal Investigator at the Fire Safety Institute. He added that all algorithms used by the system will be open source.
Governments are gradually investing in ways to make data collection more accessible while making better use of it. Eventually, researchers, and even Congress, should be able to request credentials to access her NERIS system online.
Meanwhile, Moore-Merrell said the fire department has not yet decided on a cloud provider for the system.
Only time will tell if FEMA will succeed in building NERIS on schedule. Still, the new software is evidence that governments are investing in ways to make better use of data collection while at the same time making that data more accessible.
“What is becoming much more common is the existence of online data aggregators that bring together several raw data sources and present them to the public visually, usually in map form,” says Kendra of the National Science Foundation Program. McLachlan explains. A manager focused on wildfires. “In many cases, the raw data is actually in a form that the general public cannot easily see or use.”
