Medic-unit load
50 medic-equipped stations cover 3,910 EMS calls — roughly 0.2 for every fire PFD answers. Where the call volume actually lands, and where the workload doesn't.
PFD runs both fire and EMS. The medic units — the white rigs with the red crosses — live alongside the engines and ladders, but only at a subset of stations. 50 of the city's fire stations house a medic unit; the others lean on the medics next door.
This is the geography of EMS coverage — the placement of medic-equipped stations across
the city. The Fire_Dept_Facilities layer doesn't publish coverage radii, so we describe
what the dots show: concentration in the central and river-ward zips, scattered placement
across the larger Northeast and Northwest areas.
The marigold bins are EMS dispatches by zip. 3,910 calls since 2024 — and that's just the Rescue & EMS category; other categories (false alarm, good intent, service call) drag PFD into countless additional non-fire runs.
The EMS load doesn't track the medic-station map. Some zips with no nearby medic generate enormous volume; some heavily-medic'd zones in Center City run remarkably quiet.
Zoom in on 19104 — the busiest EMS zip in the city. 390 calls in a single zip code. The same zips that top the fire ranking show up at the top of the EMS ranking — see Where Philly burns for fires and The Narcan map for overdose response in those same zips.
Now flip the framing. Same zips, same map — but each zip is divided by the number of medic-equipped stations within roughly a mile and a half. Center City shrinks: small dense zips with three medics nearby don't actually generate much work for any one of them. Outer zips swell: a single medic in a sparse-coverage area carries the full load alone.
The "busiest zip" and the "most-stretched medic zone" aren't the same map. Coverage decisions made decades ago decide which zip's emergency goes to a medic five blocks away vs. fifteen.
And the per-station view. Cobalt dots resize by estimated EMS load — nearest-zip assignment, just like the fire-station story. The medics in the busiest service areas carry the lion's share of citywide EMS volume. Citywide, EMS dispatches outpace fires by roughly 0.2-to-1.
That ratio is the actual job description. PFD's official name still leads with "Fire," but the workload tells a different story.
Profiles · EMS vs. fire by neighborhood
For each of the four busiest EMS regions, the EMS dispatch count next to the fire-only count. Where they diverge is where the "fire department" name is most misleading.
Center City
19107
- EMS dispatches
- 1,306
- Fire dispatches
- 1,169
- EMS-to-fire ratio
- 1.1×
West Philly
19104
- EMS dispatches
- 763
- Fire dispatches
- 2,240
- EMS-to-fire ratio
- 0.3×
North Philly
19122
- EMS dispatches
- 643
- Fire dispatches
- 3,758
- EMS-to-fire ratio
- 0.2×
Northeast Philly
19124
- EMS dispatches
- 342
- Fire dispatches
- 3,412
- EMS-to-fire ratio
- 0.1×
Data Sources
Primary datasets: Philadelphia Fire Department stat360_fire_incidents filtered to incident_type_category = '3 - Rescue & Emergency Medical Service Incident',
and Fire_Dept_Facilities filtered to
medic-housing stations. Both ArcGIS Feature Services. Frozen at deploy (2026-05-13).
Queries: incidentsGroupByUrl('postal_code', EMS_WHERE) for EMS dispatches by zip, incidentsGroupByUrl('postal_code', FIRE_WHERE) for the fire comparison, and facilitiesUrl() for the station markers. SQL/URL builders in src/lib/data/datasets/philly-fire.ts. Zip → neighborhood rollup: src/lib/data/static/philly/zip-to-neighborhood.json.
Methodology & caveats: No EMS-only feed and no per-medic-dispatch fields. The "per medic in coverage" and "estimated runs per station" calculations are radius/nearest proxies — see data we'd like to find for the gap. The story does not join poverty, overdose, or vacancy data — references to those patterns are cross-links to other stories that work from their own datasets, not claims computed inside this one.