Even if firefighters considered a fire to be minor and labeled it as a “pot of meat,” those small fires were supposed to be counted as part of Philadelphia’s structure fire tally under the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) that the city moved to in 2009. But Thiel, who worked on the NFIRS system as a consultant 20 years ago, said that the data entry required for even a pot of meat fire is so extensive (the stove’s serial number is one of the prompts), that firefighters might have just put “other” or not counted it at all in order to move to the next call.