District of Columbia · NERIS
NERIS reporting in the District of Columbia
The District of Columbia's NERIS directory lists a small handful of departments, not hundreds. This page is about what those few records actually say, not a state-sized reporting problem.
Fire departments in District of Columbia
- Departments in the directory
- 5
Source: the NERIS public department directory, as mirrored in our departments table on July 28, 2026. Percentages are stated against the number of departments that actually reported the field, which is always shown next to them. Departments that reported nothing are not counted as zero and no figure here is estimated.
Five departments, not fifty
The NERIS directory carries five fire departments for the District of Columbia. Four of those five report a department type, and none of the four is typed as fully volunteer: two are career, two are combination. Across the four departments that report firefighter staffing at all, the directory holds 2,222 career firefighters and not a single recorded volunteer. Whatever this page says about a reporting problem, it isn’t a volunteer-department problem here, and it would be dishonest to write it like one just because that’s the shape of most of the other pages on this site.
What the directory does and doesn’t say
Past department type and staffing, the data thins out fast. Only one of the five departments reports a population-protected figure (702,250), and only three report a station count, totaling 53 stations between them. That isn’t enough departments reporting each field to compute a meaningful share or an average, so this page doesn’t produce one: no percentage, no stations-per-department figure, nothing dressed up to look more precise than five records support. What’s here is what the directory actually holds, and nothing beyond it.
Filing still comes down to one person
None of that changes what NERIS asks for at the incident level. A combination or career department in the district still files a report per unit response, still splits fire and medical detail into separate modules, and still submits through the same API as every other department in the country. The one thing this page argues is the same thing every page on this site argues: recording the call out loud and reviewing what comes back is a faster way to finish that report than typing the whole form from a blank screen, regardless of a department’s staffing type or its size.
Worth knowing about District of Columbia
The NERIS public directory lists 5 fire departments in the District of Columbia, and 4 of them report a department type: 2 career and 2 combination, with no department typed as fully volunteer.
Source: snapshot: DC.department_count, DC.by_department_type, DC.departments_with_type_data
Across the 4 District of Columbia departments that report firefighter staffing, the directory counts 2,222 career firefighters and zero recorded volunteers.
Source: snapshot: DC.firefighters_career_sum, DC.firefighters_volunteer_sum, DC.departments_with_staffing_data
Only 1 of the district's 5 departments reports a population-protected figure (702,250), and only 3 report a station count (53 stations total) — most fields in this directory are thinner here than the department count alone suggests.
Source: snapshot: DC.population_protected_sum, DC.departments_with_population_data, DC.station_count_sum, DC.departments_with_station_data
What changed
NERIS replaced NFIRS as the federal fire incident reporting standard onFebruary 1, 2026. It is a different shape of report, not a renamed one: modules instead of flat forms, a three-level text hierarchy instead of numeric incident codes, and an API instead of a file you upload.
What actually changed, in detail · NERIS onboarding (FSRI) · Department sign-up
About grant applications
A District of Columbia department applying for an Assistance to Firefighters Grant will still be asked to describe its calls and its operations. We are not going to tell you that NERIS reporting affects AFG eligibility or scoring — nothing in our own records establishes that, and a vendor is the wrong place to learn what a federal grant program actually asks for. What we can say plainly: whatever the application wants to know about call volume, it's easier to answer from reports already filed than from a stretch of runs nobody wrote up.
We are a vendor, not a grant advisor. Do not take our word for what any grant program requires. Read the current notice of funding opportunity or ask your state's grant coordinator.
Try it on a real District of Columbia call
Record one incident, read the report it produces, and decide from there. No account, no card, no call with anyone.
FireMic is a private company. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or recommended by any District of Columbia state agency, USFA, FSRI, or FEMA. State fire officials do not endorse vendors, and nothing on this page should be read as suggesting otherwise.
Department figures: FireMic Supabase departments table (mirror of the NERIS public department directory, ArcGIS layer 0). Snapshot taken July 28, 2026.