As the fire service transitions to the National Emergency Response Information System (NERIS), one of the first tasks for many is simply finding a department’s official NERIS ID, and/or those of your neighboring / partner departments. This unique identifier is essential for data submission, system configuration, and inter-agency communication.
Whether you’re looking for your own ID or trying to find the ID for a neighboring department, here are a few effective methods to locate it.
To make finding identifiers easier, Responserack has compiled comprehensive lists of fire department NERIS IDs, conveniently organized by state. You can navigate to your state’s page to see a full list of departments and their corresponding IDs.
Note: "Find In Page" is your friend. Press CTRL-F or CMD-F or go to the menu to “Find In Page” and type “Coal” for (say) “Coal Creek Canyon Fire Protection District”. Better still, enter the first seven characters of your NERIS ID, and you’ll find your county FDs.
Once you’ve found your own department’s NERIS ID on your state’s list, you can use a simple trick to find all other departments in your county. A NERIS ID has the format FD + SSCCC + NNN, where SSCCC is the 5-digit FIPS code for your county. ( See “Understanding NERIS IDs” for more explanation of this. )
Simply use your browser’s “Find on Page” feature (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) and search for FD followed by the 5-digit FIPS code from your own ID (e.g. “FD08013"). This will highlight all the departments located in the same county.
The NERIS platform includes a built-in search function for looking up registered entities. Use the search feature to find a department by name.
By using these methods, you can quickly and easily locate the necessary NERIS IDs to ensure your department’s data reporting and administrative tasks go smoothly.
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