Every department in your jurisdiction reports differently, defines response time differently, and measures risk differently, if it measures risk at all. When a legislator asks which departments are least able to meet the risk in front of them, the answer takes weeks of phone calls and arrives as an anecdote. Risk & Response gives you one consolidated view of risk and response capability across every department you oversee, computed the same way for all of them.
The value is not another dashboard. It is that the numbers are comparable. Response times for a career metro department and a volunteer district are computed from the same NERIS incident fields, against the same percentile definitions, over the same trailing window. Risk is scored from the same federal sources for all of them, tract by tract.
Produce a consistent risk assessment for the whole state without commissioning a study or surveying departments. Every tract carries FEMA National Risk Index scores across 18 hazards plus Census demographics, aggregated to department and county. When a committee asks for the basis of a number, you can point to the source and the method rather than to a consultant's appendix.
Rank applicants on risk covered, response capability, and community vulnerability instead of on the quality of their narrative writing. The same tract-level evidence that supports your allocation also strengthens the Assistance to Firefighters Grant, SAFER, and FEMA hazard mitigation applications your departments submit. Award decisions become defensible to the departments that did not get funded.
See which departments have response performance worth documenting and which have gaps to close first. Departments already close to CFAI benchmarks are candidates for accreditation support; departments far from them need deployment work before a Standards of Cover is worth starting. Target technical assistance where it will actually change an outcome.
Evaluate station siting and automatic-aid agreements against risk and current travel performance across department lines, not within one department's boundary. Coverage gaps that look unavoidable inside a single jurisdiction often turn out to be a neighboring department's five-minute drive. This is the analysis that justifies a shared station or a redrawn first-due.
NERIS replaced NFIRS, and adoption across your departments is uneven. Track which departments are reporting, how completely, and where required fields are missing or timestamps are implausible. Data quality reporting is free for every enrolled department, so this is a lever you can use rather than a compliance report nobody reads.
Which of my departments is in the most trouble, and why. The rollup sorts every department by population served, risk score, 90th-percentile response, goal attainment, and coverage gaps, and links through to that department's full profile. It is built to be read in a meeting, not interpreted by an analyst.
This is not a data warehouse you have to fill. Every fire and EMS department in NERIS Public already has a risk profile on this site, built from public federal data and refreshed quarterly. Ohio's rollup covers 1,051 departments across 88 counties; your state's is already there too. The jurisdiction view exists the day you subscribe.
There is no implementation phase, no data conversion, and nothing to install. The public-data layer covering all of your departments is live now: browse Ohio or find your own state and click through to any department.
Response analytics require a department to enroll its NERIS integration, which takes about 15 minutes per department and grants API access to Arborlook. Departments that have not enrolled still appear in your rollup with their full risk profile; response metrics fill in as departments come online. Most jurisdictions start with the departments already enrolled and use the rollup itself to recruit the rest.
Annual subscription with multi-year prepay available. A county authority overseeing a dozen departments and a state fire marshal's office overseeing a thousand are not the same purchase, so we quote them separately rather than publishing a number that fits neither.
Departments in your jurisdiction keep their free risk profiles either way, and any department that subscribes to Response Analytics or Standards of Cover on its own keeps its own account. Per-station pricing for individual departments is on the pricing page.
Request a jurisdiction demoWe sell to public agencies and we know the quote is the easy part. Tell us what your purchasing office needs and we will produce it; we would rather spend a week on paperwork than have a subscription die in a procurement queue.
We invoice against a PO on your terms and your fiscal calendar. No credit card is required, and nothing has to route through a self-service checkout. If your office needs the invoice to reference a contract or requisition number, tell us the format.
A current W-9 is available on request. We complete state and county vendor registration forms, supplier portal onboarding, insurance certificate requests, and conflict-of-interest or debarment disclosures. If your state runs a centralized vendor system, send the link and we will register.
On request we provide a written sole-source justification describing the methodology and data sources, for your file. If your office requires competitive quotes instead, we will say so plainly and give you what you need to run the solicitation.
Multi-year prepay is billed as a single invoice, which is often easier to get approved than a recurring line item. We can align the subscription term to your fiscal year rather than the signature date, and quote across biennial budget cycles.
Email [email protected] with your jurisdiction, the number of departments you oversee, and the population served, and we will send a formal quote with whatever documentation your office requires.
I worked as a research analyst at the Oregon Office of State Fire Marshal, building data products on wildfire risk and community vulnerability. I know what it is like to be asked a statewide question on a two-day deadline, with data that lives in eleven places and agrees with itself in none of them. That experience is why this platform starts with every department already covered instead of with an onboarding project.
After Oregon I supported Manitou, Inc. with deployment and station-location analysis for departments in Connecticut, New Jersey, Michigan, and New York. I hold a PhD from Oregon State University, have done spatial and statistical analysis since graduate school, and have worked with fire and EMS data since 2021.
Dr. Jennings researches community-level fire risk, deployment analysis, and emergency response system design. He edited a special issue of Fire Technology devoted to deployment analysis methods and authored the most recent edition of Managing Fire and Emergency Services, published by the International City/County Management Association. He served as First Deputy Commissioner of Public Safety in White Plains, New York, overseeing police, fire, EMS, and emergency management, and is Principal and co-founder of Manitou, Inc. Full-study Standards of Cover engagements are fulfilled in partnership with Manitou.
FEMA National Risk Index v1.2 (18 hazard types, 85,154 tracts scored), U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 2024 (2020-2024 5-year), NERIS for incident and department data, and OpenFEMA disaster declarations. Every method is documented: see methodology and data sources.
Tell us your jurisdiction and we will walk you through the rollup for your own departments, using your own data, not a generic sample. Ian handles these conversations directly.
