These are the slides for my talk "Secrets of Fire Truck Society" at the Ignite at Strata 2013 in Santa Clara.

1. Joel Grus
@joelgrus
Chief Scientist, VoloMetrix

2. Secret: E31 is our favorite fire truck!

3. “Seattle Real-Time 911”

4. Scraped 9 years of data (2004-2012)

5. Truck Types
• Engines
• Medic and Aid
• Ladder trucks
• Battalion Chiefs
• (Others)

6. Secret: Fire trucks hang out with the downtrodden
Check-ins Location
4,580 King Co Jail
3,780 Union Gospel Mission
3,499 DESC Shelter
2,723 DESC Morrison
2,697 Frye Apartments
2,597 Noel House
2,367 SHA Jefferson Terrace
2,313 Four Freedoms House
2,172 Mt St Vincent Retirement
2,099 Harbor House

7. Secret: More than 75% of
incidents are medical not fires
Type # of Incidents
Aid Response 341k
Medic Response 159k
Auto Fire Alarm 47k
Motor Vehicle Accident 23k
Aid Response Yellow 15k
Auto Fire Alarm Resd 13k
Medic Response 7 Per Rule 10k
… …

8. Secret: Fire Trucks Like the Nightlife
12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
AM PM PM

9. Seasonality Secrets
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
1/1 2/1 3/1 4/1 5/1 6/1 7/1 8/1 9/1 10/1 11/1 12/1
-10%
-20%
-30%

10. Secret: My geocoding worked!

11. Not a secret: Seattle drivers are terrible
“Auto Accident” check-ins “Assault” check-ins “Fire” check-ins

12. Secret: 62% of check-ins are single truck

13. Secret: Geography is Destiny

14. Dates and Parties

15. Date Secrets

16. Party Secrets

17. TruckRank

18. Avg # Of Trucks at my Check-ins 12
10
8
6
A
B
E
4 L
M
2
0
0.08 0.09 0.1 0.11 0.12 0.13
TruckRank

19. Future Directions
• Changes over time?
• Why are there no “cat stuck in tree” incidents in
the data?
• Investigate other secrets:
– Police cars
– Garbage trucks
– Stuffed hippos*
* My daughter suggested this one

20. Thanks!
• More info in blog post on joelgrus.com
• Code is on github.com/joelgrus
• Data is not posted but am glad to share if you ask nicely
• Will be around for rest of Strata, so come say “hi”
• Check out VoloMetrix, we do sort of similar stuff (for companies, not fire trucks)
• Follow me on Twitter: @joelgrus