Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, completely free. No email address, no account, no trial period. Every department page is a static public webpage built from public data sources — we have no mechanism to gate it even if we wanted to.

We built the free tier because the underlying data (FEMA NRI, Census ACS, HIFLD infrastructure) is public anyway, and because getting it in front of fire chiefs is how we introduce departments to the platform. If you find the risk profile useful and want to see how your response performance compares, that's what the paid Response tier is for.

The free tier uses public datasets that are updated on their own schedules — not nightly feeds. Specifically:

• Census ACS: 2020–2024 5-year estimates, released December 2024
• FEMA National Risk Index: Version 1.2, released December 2025
• HIFLD Critical Infrastructure: Periodically updated by DHS/CISA
• Federal Disaster Declarations: Updated through early 2026

We refresh the free tier pages annually as new versions of these datasets are released. If you need current incident data — response times, call volumes, trends — that requires your department's live NERIS data, which is what the Response tier provides.

It depends on what's wrong. Department name, boundary, and station locations come from the NERIS Public dataset — if those are incorrect, the fix starts at NERIS. Updating your department's record in NERIS will flow through to our next refresh.

For errors in the data analysis itself (a metric that looks clearly wrong, a hazard score that doesn't match what FEMA NRI shows for your area), please email us at [email protected] and we'll investigate.

We generate pages for all departments in the NERIS Public dataset that have a valid boundary polygon. About 22,000 departments have boundaries; roughly 8,000 don't, and those are excluded because all our analysis is geography-based — without a boundary, we can't assign census tracts, calculate population served, or do spatial comparisons.

If your department isn't in NERIS at all, enrollment is free through FSRI. If you're in NERIS but don't have a boundary on file, contact your state fire marshal's office or FSRI directly to get it added.

Yes. The free profile covers the core elements that federal grant applications ask for in a needs assessment: community hazard exposure (FEMA NRI scores across 18 hazard types), demographic vulnerability (Census SVI components), critical infrastructure at risk (HIFLD), and federal disaster history (OpenFEMA).

AFG, SAFER, and FEMA Hazard Mitigation Assistance applications all ask questions that this data directly supports. The CSV export at the bottom of each department page gives you the underlying numbers in a format you can paste into a grant narrative or attach as supporting documentation.

The free profile shows what your community faces — hazard exposure, demographics, infrastructure. The Response tier adds the other half: how your department is actually performing against that risk.

Specifically, Response connects your incident data to the risk map. You can see response times by census tract, overlaid on the risk data — so "we're slow in this tract" becomes "we're slow in the tract with the highest concentration of residents over 85 and the most mobile homes." That's the gap analysis. It also tracks NFPA 1710/1720 compliance by geography, not just as a system-wide average.

The CRR Activity Tracker lets you log what you're doing about specific risk areas — education events, inspections, code enforcement — and see them on the same map as the risk data.

Your department needs to be enrolled in NERIS and have API access granted to Arborlook Insights. There's no data transfer, no file uploads, no IT project — NERIS handles the data sharing authorization and we connect directly.

If your department is already actively reporting to NERIS, setup takes about 15 minutes. If you're not yet in NERIS, enrollment is free through FSRI and is worth doing regardless of whether you use our platform.

NERIS is the National Emergency Response Information System, developed by FSRI (Fire Safety Research Institute) as the modern replacement for NFIRS. It's a national incident reporting system with a public API, structured data model, and active development community.

Enrollment is free and managed by FSRI. Your state fire marshal's office can also help with enrollment and data quality. NERIS is not a product — it's national infrastructure for the fire service.

Yes. Qualifying volunteer and small combination departments receive 50–75% off standard rates. The discount is applied before the founding department rate, so qualifying volunteers who enroll early pay significantly less than the list price.

Contact us at [email protected] to discuss what your department qualifies for.

Peer matching works in two steps. First, hard filters narrow the candidate pool: peers must be the same department type (career / combination / volunteer), same community class (urban / suburban / rural by population density), same U.S. Census division, and within ±50% of your department's population.

Within that filtered pool, departments are scored by weighted similarity across population, density, NRI hazard risk, elderly population share, poverty rate, and older housing stock. The 15 closest matches become your peers.

See the Methodology page for the full breakdown of weights and how each dimension is calculated.

The two types of maps answer different questions, so they use different color scales.

Natural hazard maps use a fixed national scale (0–20 / 20–40 / 40–60 / 60–80 / 80–100). Red means "high risk nationally." This lets you compare your earthquake exposure to any other department in the country on an objective basis.

Fire risk and EMS maps use a percentile scale within your jurisdiction. Red means "the highest-risk tracts in your service area." This answers a different question: given the conditions you have, which tracts should you prioritize? A department where every tract has low mobile home density would show mostly green nationally — but the local map still shows which of your tracts has the most, so you know where to focus.

Each map section includes a note explaining which type of scale it uses.

Census tracts don't align perfectly with fire department boundaries. When a tract overlaps multiple departments, we assign it to the department with the greatest overlap area. This is a simplification — some tracts are genuinely split across two jurisdictions — but it avoids double-counting and produces clean per-department metrics.

See the Methodology page for a full explanation of the spatial analysis approach.

The Regional tier is designed for organizations that need a view across multiple departments — county fire authorities, regional mutual aid compacts, COGs, and state fire marshal offices.

Rather than buying individual department subscriptions, a Regional subscription covers every department in your jurisdiction with a single login, rollup dashboards, and cross-department benchmarking. Pricing is custom based on the number of departments and scope of coverage.

Email [email protected] to discuss.