San Francisco Emergencies

Exploring Poverty and Fire Rescue Responses with Open Data

Each city has a defining characteristic that makes it attractive to visitors and new arrivals. While Los Angeles derives part of its identity from its notorious congestion and idiosyncratic arterial freeways, San Francisco is the dense metropolis that supplies Silicon Valley with much of its wealth and venture capital.

However, there was a time before San Francisco became the tech-oriented urban center we know and lampoon today, and not all of the city is gilded with such VC money. The city has an underlying emergency, and so we looked at some public data to bring it to light.

Given the city’s growing reputation for tech, you’d assume that its fire and paramedic crews would respond timely during an emergency call. Here’s how San Francisco tracks its fire department’s responses to emergencies.

Where There’s Smoke…

In writing this project, we looked at emergency management datasets from multiple cities to see if they had anything particularly noteworthy or profound to show us about their cities. We decided to settle on San Francisco for one primary reason: the City of San Francisco has the most comprehensive recording of data for responses by its fire department. In particular, we appreciated that the city inputs time stamps for each step of its emergency response in addition to the specific units dispatched and exact location for each call.

Thanks to this well-curated data, we created a granular picture of how fire department responses varied by the economic clout of the neighborhood.

Fire Incidents and Poverty

Using the latest update for CARTO software, we mapped out the relationship between fire incidents from 2016 in San Francisco and income distribution by households as recorded by U.S. Census tracts of the city.