Seattle Fire overdose responses, July 2026
Seattle Fire was dispatched to 98 overdose calls in July 2026, down 46.7% from a year earlier. Over the life of the series the monthly count has run between 68 (August 2022) and 233 (October 2023).
This is the timely companion to the overdose death count, and it is a different measurement in every respect. Deaths are certified by the Medical Examiner and arrive as an annual figure a year late; these are dispatches, and they land the same day. Most of them are survivals — a response is a call for help, and the great majority of people the medics reach do not die. So the two lines answer different questions: one counts the worst outcome, this one counts how often the emergency happens at all.
Two limits, and both matter. The chart starts in August 2022 because that is when an overdose dispatch type first appears in the feed — the flat run of zeros before it is a missing label, not a city without overdoses, and it is why there is no pre-fentanyl baseline here to compare against. And the cut is a substring match on free text, which the department writes inconsistently (‘Medic Response-Overdose’, ‘BC Med Response Overdose’), so it is a floor: an overdose dispatched as an unconscious person, or a cardiac arrest, is not in it.
Source: Seattle Fire Department, Real-Time 911 Calls, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata kzjm-xkqj), responses whose free-text dispatch type contains OVERDOSE. A floor on overdose responses rather than an exact count. Auto-generated each build.