The fire service has significant opportunity to leverage data to help inform the service they provide to their communities. Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool that can be used to pull data from many different sources to help policy makers and the public be more informed about the work fire departments do day in and day out.
In this blog post, I look at open-source data of the Manchester, NH Fire Department to create a data dashboard.
Manchester Fire publishes the last 7 days of calls for service on their website (Click here to see). With that data, I used PowerBi to "Scrape" the data, and then create the dashboard below.
The visualization shows what types of calls the department is responding to, the hours they are most busy and a map of where those calls are occurring. From a leadership perspective, this gives a quick overview of the status of the department. Each of these charts relates to the others, so by clicking on any category you can "drill down" into even more info.
For example, if I click on "Not Alert" in the pie chart, The rest of the visual will drill down to just that information. I can quickly see the overall trends of safe station over the past week, what hours these calls occurred (Most around 7pm) and where they occurred (a majority at the Central Fire Station).
PowerBi offers incredible power to make the most out of your data or data that is important to you. These dashboards can be made public (like how the report is above) or can be kept private to just your organization. Let me know if this data is helpful and if you'd like to see more examples of how to use Power Bi.. Have additional questions? Go to my "Contact" page and leave me a message.
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