When Is an Incident Not an Incident?

The National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) is an all incident reporting system, meaning that you can utilize NFIRS to report all emergencies to which your department responds. However, some fire department activities should not be reported to NFIRS. This NFIRSGram helps fire departments to determine which activities are not reported to NFIRS.

After a fire department responds to an emergency incident, department personnel complete an NFIRS report documenting what they found in the course of their activities. Fire departments use the NFIRS report to document their response to an emergency, whether or not the fire department finds an emergency upon arrival.

While NFIRS does capture some nonemergency incidents, such as service calls, you should not use the NFIRS report to document scheduled events such as parades, code inspections or department training. Documenting activities of that nature is accomplished by other means, especially if participation in those activities counts toward some type of length of service award program for the members of the fire department.

Examples of activities to report and not to report