Two useful datasets — Uplink Archive

The U.S. Forest Service maintains databases on forest fires and arsons that journalists can use to investigate fire incidents, their causes, and impacts on communities. Two main databases—NIFMID for wildland fires and an arson database—provide detailed information about fire occurrence, weather conditions, and fire characteristics, though both have limitations in coverage and timeliness.

Each year, the U.S. Forest Service reports about 14,000 forest fires. Perhaps more startling, half-a-million arsons occur annually as well. These fires damage property, cost firefighters time and taxpayers money, and can sometimes kill.

The government is trying to understand how, why and when these fires occur. So they keep these incidents as records in databases. You can use the databases to find out if your city's firefighters are up to speed, if your state has to pay year after year to restore damage caused by forest fires or even who is to blame for the fire.

The National Interagency Fire Management Integrated Database (NIFMID) stores data on wildland fire occurrence and fire weather observations.

There are two databases that can of these questions and lead to stories that reveal the facts about your city and its fire protection.

Forest fires

First, the forest-fire data. It's important to understand that only fires that occur within national forests are included.

The National Interagency Fire Management Integrated Database (NIFMID) stores data on wildland fire occurrence and fire weather observations. Weather data is collected from federal, state, and local fire-management agencies from throughout the United States. Fire-occurrence data includes Forest Service fire reports from 1970 to the present.

With the weather data, observations are received hourly for approximately 800 stations. Another 800 or so stations observe weather once per day. The fire-occurrence data is updated periodically throughout the year. "Officially" the fire data is loaded "within 10-days of being declared out," but more often it is entered after the local fire season. So the agency tries to get all the data for the calendar year entered by the end of February, so it can run year-end reports.

All fires have an entry in the fire-occurrences table. Other tables offer more information about the events. However, not every fire in the occurrences table will be included in the report tables because filling out this information is optional. Most fires do have entries in the fire-resources-used, fire-events, and fire-causes tables. Other tables handle information generally only collected on large fires or for special purposes.

These tables join by the fire_id, which is unique to each fire. Some interesting information contained in fields is: land ownership, acres burned, agency responsible for reporting fire and working the fire, the cause of the fire, the intensity of the fire and the vegetation that it killed. All this information comes from fields that must be filled out.

Arson data

There is some incredibly detailed data found within three different tables, but there are some holes. Only 14,000 departments, in 42 states, out of 30,000 report. Also, the data is current only through 1998.

The data helps answer questions like: How many fires occurred on Fridays, Saturdays, etc.? How many fires occurred each hour of the day or month of the year? What was the average response time? How much did response time vary by station location? What was the average amount of time spent at the fire scene and how much did that time vary depending on the type of fire?

For more information, go to wwww.usfa.fema.gov/pdfdah.pdf

Obtaining the information may be costly. The Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1974 (P.L. 93-498) authorizes the National Fire Data Center in the United States Fire Administration (USFA) to gather and analyze information on the magnitude of the nation's fire problem, as well as its detailed characteristics and trends. The system that gathers the data is called the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS).

The NFIRS Master, Incident and Equipment/Casualty tables can be ordered from the National Technical Information Service on magnetic tape (9-track, EBCDIC character set) and CD-ROM.

File descriptions and prices are: Master File, which includes fire department identification, report of submitted incidents, incident, mobile property, hazardous materials incident, equipment, civilian casualty, and fire service casualty record types. Cost: $454. Incident File, which includes fire department identification, submitted incidents and basic incident records. Cost: $454. Equipment/Casualty File, which includes fire department identification, mobile property, equipment, civilian casualty, and fire service casualty records. Cost: $305.