The non-fire fire calls
Only 14% of PFD dispatches are actual fires. A taxonomy of the other 86%.
The headline split
Of the 128,491 dispatches the Philadelphia Fire Department logged, 17,887 were actual fires. The other 110,604 — almost six in seven calls — were something else entirely.
Every category, ranked
The full NFIRS-coded breakdown. Fire is the second-largest category by volume — beaten handily by false alarms and false calls, the single biggest driver of PFD's call volume.
The non-fire-only ranking
Drop the fire bucket and re-rank against the non-fire pool only. False Alarm & False Call alone accounts for 55% of every non-fire run. Good-intent calls (someone smelled smoke; nothing burning), service calls (lockouts, down wires, water leaks), and hazmat events round out the bulk of the rest.
Why this matters
The Philadelphia Fire Department's name leads with "Fire," and the public imagination follows suit. But the operational reality — the trucks rolling, the crews dispatched, the radio traffic — is mostly not fires. False alarms in particular are a grinding tax on response capacity: every false-alarm dispatch ties up an engine that can't go to a real call, and they outnumber actual fires by a wide margin.
For the geography of all of these — which zips generate the most calls, which stations absorb the load — see Stations and zips. For the rescue-and-EMS slice specifically, see Medic-unit load.
Data Sources
Primary dataset: Philadelphia Fire Department stat360_fire_incidents ArcGIS Feature Service. Frozen at deploy (2026-05-13).
Queries: incidentsGroupByUrl('incident_type_category') aggregating dispatch counts by
the PFD incident-type taxonomy. Defined in src/lib/data/datasets/philly-fire.ts.
Methodology & caveats: "Fire" rows are filtered against INCIDENT_CATEGORY.fire (the PFD's category-1 label); everything else rolls up as
the non-fire pool. Counts are dispatches, not incidents — a single fire can generate several
runs.