Fire departments across the United States handle a wide spectrum of incidents, from daily emergencies to large-scale hazards involving chemical spills or severe weather conditions.
In many towns, there is a need for timely, detailed data to guide decisions about staffing, station locations, and specialized equipment.
That need grows as new problems—such as lithium-ion battery failures and wildland-urban interface fires—add complexity.
Although data has long been gathered, older systems struggle to keep pace.
The American fire service has reached a point where fresh methods are required to support near-real-time analysis and more precise planning.
Until recently, incident data was funneled through platforms that date back to older coding practices.
Those systems faced constant strain when processing events that were more diverse than structure fires alone.
The existing National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) was introduced decades ago and provided useful aggregate data at one time.
Over the years, however, it has struggled to accommodate the rapidly increasing variety of threats.
With code built on aging structures, it could not link to modern sensor networks, geographic information systems, or real-time analytics tools, and so NERIS was born.
Launched on November 4, 2024, the National Emergency Response Information System (NERIS) set out to fill that void.
It took shape through joint efforts between the Fire Safety Research Institute, the U.S.
Fire Administration (USFA), the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, and leading fire and EMS practitioners.
NERIS rests on a secure, cloud-based structure with the goal of capturing all-hazards incident data in near-real-time.
Early testing began with over 60 fire departments, which contributed feedback before more than 100 additional departments signed on by the end of 2024.
In January 2025, NERIS expanded to every interested department nationwide, eventually replacing NFIRS as the primary reporting tool.
NERIS arrives at a time when lithium-ion batteries, wildland-urban interface fires, and extreme weather conditions present new difficulties for local responders.
To address these concerns, the platform merges dispatch records, sensor feeds, geographic data, and more.
Rather than simply storing event details, it turns them into practical dashboards that can be updated quickly.
This helps teams coordinate resources, stay aware of shifting hazards, and adjust tactics based on evidence rather than guesswork.
Because it is cloud-hosted, departments of any size can use it without added expense, which is especially important for smaller agencies with limited budgets.
Departments can tap into the platform’s analytic tools to see trends in mutual and automatic aid calls, spot where resources might be stretched thin, and identify areas that repeatedly face high-risk incidents.
Since data is updated near real-time, administrators gain sharper awareness of equipment needs, staffing gaps, and patterns in the community.
This extends beyond structure fires to include EMS calls, hazardous materials incidents, and more.
Under the previous system, data often arrived late and lacked depth.
Now, departments have the potential to map occurrences, assess performance gaps, and determine the best path for prevention strategies.
Rather than shutting down NFIRS overnight, the USFA will maintain both systems in parallel through 2025.
Fire and EMS departments could continue logging incidents in the older system until their data was fully transferred.
By early 2026, NERIS will become the default source for reporting and analyzing operations at the local, state, and national levels.
As NERIS matures across the country, there are practical outcomes for everyday operations as well as long-range planning.
Leaders can study how factors like weather patterns or specific building hazards correlate with results, then shape their training regimens accordingly.
Staff can spot spikes in certain call types and plan resource placements with greater accuracy.
NERIS is an overhaul that puts near-real-time reporting within reach for over 27,000 fire and EMS departments.
The system carries no direct usage cost for local agencies, removing a significant barrier to better data collection.
With sensor-driven data points, integrated dispatch feeds, and flexible analytics, it presents a fresh path to address threats that shift each year.
Whether the challenge stems from lithium-ion battery hazards or severe storms, local teams are positioned to respond with greater precision.
In January, Dr. Lori Moore-Merrell stepped down as U.S. Fire Administrator.
Fire and Safety Journal Americas caught up with her to discuss the development of the National Emergency Response Information System (NERIS) during her time in office, looking at how it took shape and where she believes data solutions can lead the fire service in the future.
You really can’t talk about NERIS without mentioning a bit of where we’ve been.
We had a 50-year-old legacy system, designed in 1974, launched in 1976, and updated in 2002 when it went web-based. That was our national data scenario.
Fire departments, even though they were required if they wanted to apply for grants at the national level, had an incentive to contribute data into the system.
Our national data system was embraced by all states, and about 76% of our departments across the country participated, but the data varied.
Some of it was okay, some of it was very bad. The main issue was timeliness: by the time you had usable data, it was two years old. That’s just not workable now.
Years ago, it gave you some trends and insights, but today, I need data from five minutes ago.
That old system was no longer viable, and it had too many security vulnerabilities for modern technology requirements.
We started from scratch and built a system that was fit for purpose.
We asked ourselves: what is the purpose and need for data in the fire service? Why do they need it? My background has been about figuring out all the places we need data for decision-making, whether it’s before an incident—prevention and community risk reduction—or during an incident, so we can match resources to the specific risk.
If we don’t match resources to the event, we risk negative outcomes, like firefighter or civilian injuries and deaths, plus property loss.
Afterward, we need to learn from the incident: what worked, what didn’t, and what changes do we make? Do we need more stations, different crew sizes, better public education? All of that relies on data.
What we built is not just a database—it’s an analytics platform.
The National Emergency Response Information System, or NERIS, is actually a system of data systems.
It brings information from multiple areas, previously siloed, into a geospatial framework.
I can see the risk environment at a specific location, every fire station, which apparatus rides out of each station, how many crew members are on it, and so forth.
These assets are all in NERIS, and now we can overlay incident data in near real time by connecting with dispatch systems.
Another data source is the computer-aided dispatch system, including vehicle locators, so we know where every unit is.
All these data points get pulled together and fused into one platform.
That’s NERIS, and it will keep evolving because we designed it as a dynamic framework.
In the legacy system, for example, we couldn’t even record lithium-ion battery fires properly.
There was no category, so some departments called them hazmat fires, others called them electrical fires, and so on.
That’s why we couldn’t answer the question, “How many lithium-ion battery fires do we have?” We just didn’t know.
Now, you can record that directly, because we designed the data schema like a storytelling approach—it documents the story of the response.
It notes what happened, where it happened.
If there’s no official address (say, out in a field), a firefighter can drop a pin, draw a circle, and the system will identify the location.
It has that kind of intelligence built in.
We did all this so we can make decisions at different points in time and at different levels of government, ultimately giving us a real picture of the fire problem in America, of our resource capabilities, and of any gaps.
Nationwide, we don’t have enough firefighters for the threats we face, but we haven’t been able to show that clearly until now.
With this, we can demonstrate those gaps and work toward matching our resources to the risk environment across the nation.
NERIS will also include features for post-fire investigation and for tracking firefighter exposures.
Every firefighter can record exposures to toxic environments—products of combustion, hazardous materials, whatever the toxin might be—as well as behavioral health exposures to traumatic events.
We know the triggers: doing CPR on an infant, active shooter incidents, a firefighter fatality, and so on.
These are serious traumas, and reporting them helps us track the mental health impact. That’s another piece NERIS will provide.
