Saturday, June 28, 2014

The week ahead

It's going to be a busy one for the public safety personnel. Independence Day is usually the busiest single day of the year, and this year it falls on a Friday, which should raise the bar even further. Here's  a prediction of the week to come from FireView Dashboard. The software takes the past couple of years' data for the same dates, adjusts for the pattern of variation by day-of-week, and predicts the number of incidents for the coming week. The red line is the predicted number of incidents for Lincoln Fire & Rescue, the blue bars are the actual number of incidents dispatched for the past 14 days, and the gray bars are the prediction for the next seven days:


You can see how the workload is expected to ramp up as the week unfolds. Looks like we are expecting to peak at 84 incidents for LF&R on July 4th. On the police side, the prediction is for 378 incidents we would expect to dispatch on July 4. I think that's a little low: last year Lincoln police responded to 401 incidents on the Fourth, and it was on a Thursday. Weather will make a big difference. Here's a map from CrimeView Dashboard of the fireworks disturbance dispatches alone, in the week-long run up to Independence day last year:


Those phones in the Emergency Communications Center will be ringing off the hook, and I'll find some criticism in my inbox from those who think that the police alone can stop tens of thousands of people from violating the law by firing off illegal fireworks, and ignoring the time and date limitations. My past rants on this topic still hold true, for the most part.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any time someone asks "Where do our tax dollars go? Why can't the police do (etc)?" I point them to your blog, and this 4th will be no exception.

You and your police and fire teams may not always get the recognition they deserve, but at lest some of us appreciate the work you do.

Have a safe and happy Independence Day, and here's to more of us remembering why we celebrate than blowing our hands off. If not, there's always next year.

Older'n' dirt said...

we bought fireworks many years ago--even travelled to Missouri for some. Now I just watch them from my window and wish I had a small percentage of the money spent on the stuff. I can remember, too, when sparklers were the approved firework for kids.

Anonymous said...

It would be interesting to learn how accurate the computer based predictions were in hindsight. Let's see if they are even half as accurate as Ken Siemek... who gets it right about 20% of the time.