A day on the fire & medical radio

The day as it happened

Play the dispatch log

Press play to stream the day's runs in the order they came in — the radio log, reconstructed from the dispatch records. EMS stands for Emergency Medical Services (the ambulances). There's no map here because FDNY withholds exact locations for medical privacy; the police companion has the animated map.

00:00press play

Speed

Press play to start the day at midnight, or drag the slider to any hour…

The rhythm of the day

When the runs came in

FDNY runs by hour of the day, for the precinct and service you picked.

What the runs were

The call mix

The response

How fast help arrived

How far each run travelled through dispatch, and how long each leg took. Medians are shown because a long tail of low-acuity calls left waiting pulls the averages far higher.

The pipeline (median)

Response by urgency

Methodology

How this works — and its limits

Source & method

Data: FDNY EMS Incident Dispatch Data (76xm-jjuj) and Fire Incident Dispatch Data (8m42-w767), NYC Open Data. Both carry a policeprecinct field, so runs filter to the same precincts as the police version. Queried live for your selection.
Coverage: through March 31, 2026 — fresher than the police calls feed (which ends Dec 2025), so days after that have no police counterpart to compare.

Definitions & caveats

No map. FDNY dispatch records are not geocoded to a point (medical privacy); location is ZIP + precinct only. So this companion leads with time and response, not a dot map.
Response time = incident-created to first-unit-on-scene, using FDNY's own response-second fields, for runs FDNY flags as having a valid response time.
EMS urgency (severity 1–8): 1 is most life-threatening, 8 least. This is FDNY's assignment; the data bears it out — severity 1–3 runs reach the scene in single-digit-to-low-double-digit minutes, while 4+ can wait far longer. “Life-threatening” here means severity 1–3.
EMS call types are FDNY's own initial call-type codes; the plain-language meaning shown next to each (e.g. “Abdominal pain (ABDPN)”) comes from FDNY's official Call Type Descriptions file. A handful of operational codes (e.g. CARDBR) have no published description and appear as the raw code. The call type reflects what the caller reported, not the patient's actual condition.
Medians, not means — a long tail of low-acuity runs badly skews the averages.
No outcomes. These records carry response and disposition timing, but no patient outcome, and are not linked to the police calls at the record level.

Made with AI assistance

Verified: every figure is computed in your browser from the raw FDNY records returned for your selection — nothing is estimated or cached.
Verified: the EMS severity scale direction was checked against actual response times in the data before labeling.
Not independently verified: the accuracy of FDNY's underlying records, including how each run was coded and timestamped.
Judgment calls: the plain-language EMS call-type labels and the “life-threatening = severity 1–3” grouping are editorial. A single day is a snapshot, not a typical pattern.