Allegheny County 911 Dispatches - EMS and Fire

The Allegheny County 911 center answers and dispatches 911 calls for 111 out of 130 municipalities in Allegheny County. Agencies are dispatched via a computer aided dispatch (CAD) system. This dataset contains dispatched EMS and Fire events from the CAD and includes details about the nature of the emergency.

To protect the privacy of callers and prevent sensitive health or other identifying information being revealed, the following steps were taken:

  • Aggregated event location to census block groups.
  • Aggregated call date/time to quarter and year.
  • Shortened call types to remove potentially identifying information.
  • Flagged certain call types as containing sensitive health information, such as mental health issues, overdose, etc.
  • Checked frequency of calls with sensitive health information:
    • If the number of calls (in a particular category related to sensitive health information) for a certain quarter/year and census block group was greater than or equal to 5, the call description was included.
    • If less than 5, the call description was redacted.

Events requiring EMS and Fire services will appear in both datasets with a different Call ID. Events requiring two agencies of the same service (e.g. two or more different fire companies responded to a major fire) will only list the primary responder.

The call descriptions are based on information provided by the caller. The calls are not later updated with a disposition or correction if the original description was inaccurate. For example, if EMS is dispatched to the scene of a stroke, but the person actually had a heart attack, that record would not be updated later with the correct description.

A small subset of the CAD data had no call type recorded. These records are preserved with a "null" in the Description_Short field. Redacted call types are listed as "Removed".

The 19 municipalities that dispatch their own EMS, Fire, and/or Police services are called "ringdown municipalities". These are subject to change. The list can be found in the Ringdown Municipalities 2019 resource.

Due to the size of these tables, you may experience 504 Gateway Timeout errors when trying to download the first two resources below. Use the following links instead.

To download the 911 EMS Dispatches table, click on this link: https://tools.wprdc.org/downstream/ff33ca18-2e0c-4cb5-bdcd-60a5dc3c0418

To download the 911 Fire Dispatches table, click on this link: https://tools.wprdc.org/downstream/b6340d98-69a0-4965-a9b4-3480cea1182b

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Public Access Level Comment

Exact time and location have been aggregated to year/quarter and Census blockgroup (2010). Certain event descriptions have been removed or shortened to preserve privacy.
Temporal Coverage 2015/01/01 to present
Geographic Unit Census Block Group
Data Notes
Related Document(s)
Frequency - Data Change Multiple Times per Hour
Frequency - Publishing Quarterly
Data Steward Geoffrey Arnold
Data Steward Email Geoffrey Arnold