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Fort Blackmore VFD received a Virginia Fire Incident Reporting System [VFIRS] Grant in 2003. With that grant money, we were able to purchase a laptop computer. The NFIRS software was free. We now maintain all of our Call Data on the NFIRS website. We also maintain a data line through Mountainet in Scott Co., VA. Although at times, our patience runs out using the 58K modem. Sometimes our connection is lost, but we stay with it until our data is entered with the National Fire Data Center. This grant money, through the Commonwealth of Virginia, is directly connected to the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1974.
The Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act allows the National Fire Data Center [NFDC] to get fire information. It tries to figure out how bad or how good the fire situation is in America. It also tries to find trends in the fire service as far as fighting fires goes. This Act also lets USFA get their 'act' together: encouraging departments, big and small, to participate.
NFIRS has 2 things they look for: [1] to help the State and local government to do fire reporting, and [2] to get data to figure out how to fight fire on a national level. In order to do that, the United States Fire Administration [USFA], developed NFIRS. It is a software program that allows even small fire departments like FBVFD the ability to report fires and maintain some kind of documentation for each fire incident.
Local fire departments fill out Incident reports & Casualty reports. These electronic files are forwarded to NFIRS. The Commonwealth of Virginia uses that information to help fund fire departments and find out what is going on in the big land of "fire". Then, the data is sent to the NFDC and released to the US government and its citizens. This data is used to help the nation, our commonwealth, and local departments figure out what's going on. This is the largest data base in our nation and in the world.
 | "The NFIRS represents the world's largest, national, annual database of fire incident information. |
| State participation in NFIRS is voluntary. |
| 50 states and the District of Columbia report NFIRS data. |
| 38 fire departments with a population protected of over 500,000 participate in the NFIRS. |
| Nationally, over 18,000 fire departments report in the NFIRS each year. |
| Participating departments report an average of 11,000,000 incidents and 800,000 fires each year. |
| The NFIRS database comprises roughly one half of all reported fires that occur annually." |
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This Page was Last Edited on 12/10/2008 09:20:32 PM -0500