Seattle Fire 911 responses, August 2026
Seattle Fire dispatched 10,147 responses in August 2026, up 2.9% from a year earlier. Despite the name, this is mostly not a fire series, which is why the categories now get their own graphs rather than sharing a pair of axes: medical work is most of the volume and the fire work is small enough that on a shared scale it is a flat line along the bottom.
Medic responses — paramedic-level (ALS) calls, the most serious tier — ran 1,543, up 17.3% year over year. Aid responses — the basic (BLS) tier, and the single largest category — ran 5,405, down 3.2%. Between them that is 6,948 of the month’s total, leaving about 3,199 responses across everything else the department is sent to.
Fires are separable, with a caveat. The feed has no fire flag — only a free-text dispatch type — so the third chart counts responses whose type names a fire (‘Fire in Building’, ‘Brush Fire’, ‘Auto Fire’), with automatic alarms excluded because most of those turn out not to be fires. That makes it a floor on fire work rather than a count of fires: a fire first dispatched as an alarm, or under a label like ‘Illegal Burn’, is not in it.
The sawtooth is real seasonality, plus the calendar. Part of the month-to-month zigzag is just month length — February has 28 days and posts a low count for that reason alone. Per day, over the last decade, July runs about +6% against the surrounding year and April about -4%: the load builds through the summer and falls off in the spring. That is the shape of more people outdoors, more heat, more traffic and more alcohol — it shows up strongest in aid calls and only weakly in medic calls, which is what you would expect if the summer increment is minor injury rather than cardiac arrest. Because the series is not seasonally adjusted, compare a month to the same month a year earlier, never to the one before it.
All of these count dispatched responses, not incidents or patients — one event can draw several units, so the lines move with deployment practice as well as with need.
Source: Seattle Fire Department, Real-Time 911 Calls, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata kzjm-xkqj). Categories are cut from the free-text dispatch type, so they are floors rather than exact counts. Auto-generated each build.