As fire departments transition from the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) to the new National Emergency Response Information System (NERIS), one of the key changes is how mutual and automatic aid is recorded.
In NFIRS 5.0, aid between fire departments was captured in a single data element: Aid Given or Received. This field required departments to select from a list that combined the direction (given or received) with the type of aid (mutual or automatic).
The NFIRS codes for aid were:
NFIRS focused on aspects of an incident that many (even senior) volunteer firefighters have little or no awareness about. Which remote areas of the fire district are mutual aid verses automatic aid, or perhaps not covered by any agreement? This is an administrative topic, not an incident / operational topic.
Fire departments help fire departments, based upon time-critical operational need - prioritizing life safety above all else, often resolving details of agreements well after the fact. Firefighters don’t think about or use “agreement information” on a regular basis, so don’t have it in working memory.
NERIS is doing a good job of making the reporting questions things that the reporting firefighter (e.g. command) knows from the scene, not has to look up or calculate or (typically) wait for some investigation to answer.
NERIS modernizes this by separating the concept into two distinct fields, allowing for more precise reporting:
Further, the aid agreement type is dropped as not relevant at the incident report level. Wether it was mutual aid or automatic aid or other aid is not data needed for each incident.
The aid_type field in NERIS now identifies what kind of aid is given at the incident level, not (so much) at the agreement level:
This separation allows for a clearer understanding of inter-agency cooperation and resource planning.
| Aid Type | Description | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| SUPPORT_AID | Mutual / automatic aid in support of primary entity | Aid is given/received by a neighboring entity to support a primary entity during an incident response by providing additional resources. In this situation, both entities are present at an incident and the entity providing aid is outside of its jurisdictional boundary. |
| IN_LIEU_AID | Mutual / automatic aid in lieu of primary entity | Aid is given/received by a neighboring entity when it responds to an incident because the primary department is unavailable or the other entity is closer to the emergency. In this situation, only the entity providing aid is present for the response outside of their jurisdictional boundary. |
| ACTING_AS_AID | Mutual / automatic aid acting as another entity | Aid is given/received by a neighboring entity when it temporarily assumes the operational responsibilities of another department during an incident response, usually under contract or standing formal agreement. |
The aid_direction field simplifies the other half of the equation, specifying whether your department was giving or receiving help. The values will be straightforward, such as:
As with many things in NERIS, this now relies upon information that the reporting firefighter actually knows from scene. Further, it gives a better understanding of why aid was provided in this case, not of the various particular agreements.
In the November 2025 release of NERIS an update was made to validation such that incidents reported as “providing aid” no longer required full reporting details. Meaning, if you provided aid (mutual or automatic) where firefighters brought water as part of a water shuttle, you were NOT required to fill out a full structure fire report.
This is obvious, in hindsight, since you likely do NOT know the specific details - and also the primary agency will be reporting on that - but was coded into NERIS as of the November release.
We can go help our neighbors without lots of paperwork. :-)
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