NFPA Journal - Spring 2024 - 38

ast spring, the United States Fire
Administration made an announcement
that surprised and delighted
many fire departments and fire
data aficionados around the country:
After nearly a half century, the
aging and often-criticized National
Fire Incident Reporting System,
known broadly as NFIRS, would be
retired and replaced with a smarter
and far more powerful platform.
By the end of this year, the
new system, called the National
Emergency Response Information
System (NERIS), will become
the sole mechanism by which all
incident data from the 27,000 fire
departments across the U.S. is captured
and analyzed. NERIS will be
" very different than what we have
today, " said Dr. Lori Moore-Merrell,
the U.S. fire administrator, in a webinar last July.
" We aren't even calling it a data platform. NERIS is
an information system. "
For nearly 50 years, the U.S. has relied on NFIRS
as the national system for collecting a vast array of
incident data from fire departments, including key
metrics such as where and how fires start, what fire
safety systems were present, and the deaths, injuries,
and property losses that resulted. All of that information
is manually entered by local departments
after an incident, then flows through a series of local
and state systems before it arrives in the NFIRS
database, where it is cleaned and processed. Eventually,
the data is provided for analysis to researchers
and organizations, such as NFPA, where it is used
to identify trends, inform policy and code development,
and justify spending on training, educational
campaigns, research, and more.
But NFIRS is showing its age. Built in 1976 in an
analog world, the system is rigid and slow, its architecture
bloated and antiquated. Meaningful insights
from the collected data often lag many months or
even years behind when incidents occur, and the
system is no match for the accelerating pace of
innovation that can generate new hazards seemingly
overnight. In today's dynamic threat environment,
critics liken NFIRS to maneuvering a tanker ship
through an ever-thickening armada of icebergs.
By contrast, the U.S. Fire Administration (USFA)
says that NERIS will operate more like a speed boat:
smartly and nimbly providing more and better fire
incident data faster and in real time, all while asking
less of fire departments. Instead of relying almost
exclusively on department-reported data, as NFIRS
has, the new platform will hoover up data from a
variety of federal databases across a range of topics:
census, weather, geographic information systems,
traffic, and a host of others. It will also connect to
an individual fire department's computer-aided
38 | NFPA JOURNAL * SPRING 2024
dispatch (CAD) and possibly even radio traffic,
allowing NERIS to automatically collect key metrics
and details from an incident without anyone
having to manually enter them. What incident data
departments do still have to manually enter into
NERIS will be reduced, and the process for doing so
will be streamlined and simplified, USFA has said.
Importantly, the system will also have powerful
analytics capabilities, using artificial intelligence
and machine learning to spot patterns in this vast
data array to give departments insights that might
otherwise have remained hidden.
But all of that next-level promise is accompanied
by an array of complicated challenges and difficult
questions, facts that even its developers readily
admit. Take for example the goal of alleviating the
time-consuming manual labor that departments
now invest entering incident data: Can NERIS
achieve its goal without losing the granular, bootson-the-ground
details about fire incidents that
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