ESO Releases 2023 ESO Fire Service Index to Explore Key Trends and Measures Affecting Fire Departments Across the Country

Index looks at estimated property loss, the most common types of fires and firefighter decontamination rates

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ESO, the leading data and software company serving emergency medical services (EMS), fire departments, hospitals, state and federal agencies today announced the findings of its 2023 Fire Service Index. The Index looks at key trends across fire departments nationwide, including the number of EMS calls versus fire-related incidents, first apparatus response time, the most common property types involved in fire-related incidents and estimated property loss, and decontamination. Data for the Index are from January 1, 2022 through December 31, 2022 and come from the ESO Data Collaborative.

“The ESO Fire Service Index allows us to show agencies where fires are taking place and give them an opportunity to compare that information to their own communities,” said Bill Gardner, Senior Director of Fire Products at ESO. “We can determine trends within the industry so that individual agencies can create their own community risk reduction programs based on the data. During COVID, we saw a rise in residential fires and that information still stands true this year as the environment where people work has changed. As the fire service, we need to adjust our training and what we’re doing in terms of prevention and code compliance.”

Key Findings Include:

• Fire departments, by and large, respond to more EMS calls than fire calls: EMS incidents accounted for 68% of all incidents, while fire responses accounted for 3% of incidents. With the advent of new, more fire-resistant building materials – as well as an increase in community risk reduction programs – fire calls have been decreasing overall.
• Residential properties accounted for 80% of all fire calls: Residential properties (one or two-family dwelling structures and multifamily dwelling properties) accounted for 80% of all fire incident locations.
• Within fire calls, the most common incident types include: 1) Structure fire (31%), 2) Outside rubbish fire (24%) and 3) Natural vegetation fire (22%). Patterns in vegetation fires may be due to changing wildland patterns or reduced wildland management, which are causing longer, more frequent and larger wildland fires.
• In aggregate, residential properties represented the largest financial losses in fire incidents; however, property loss is likely under-documented: Estimated property loss was $1B+, with another 268 million dollars in estimated content loss.
• Decontamination: 82% of fire incidents had at least one decontamination procedure noted. That is down by 4% compared to last year’s data. Documenting decontamination efforts are important to ensure firefighter health and safety, particularly when it comes to preventing cancer.

The full Index can be downloaded here.

About the ESO Fire Service Index

The dataset for the ESO Fire Service Index is real-world data, compiled and aggregated from 1,461 agencies across the United States that use ESO’s products and services. The 2023 ESO Fire Service Index looked at 4,527,591 incidents from January 1, 2022-December 31, 2022.

About ESO

ESO (ESO Solutions, Inc.) is dedicated to improving community health and safety through the power of data. Since its founding in 2004, the company continues to pioneer innovative, user-friendly software to meet the changing needs of today’s EMS agencies, fire departments, hospitals, state EMS offices and federal agencies. ESO currently serves thousands of customers throughout North America with a broad software portfolio, including the industry-leading ESO Electronic Health Record (EHR), the next generation ePCR; ESO Health Data Exchange (HDE), the first-of-its-kind healthcare interoperability platform; ESO Fire RMS, the modern fire Record Management System; ESO Patient Registry (trauma, burn and stroke registry software); and ESO State Repository. ESO is headquartered in Austin, Texas. For more information, visit www.eso.com.