Frederick County Fire & Rescue Incidents Dashboard

A real-time incident tracking and analytics dashboard for Frederick County, Maryland fire and rescue calls. The project scrapes incident data from frederickscanner.com and publishes an interactive dashboard and RSS feed.

Live dashboard: newsappsumd.github.io/fredscanner

About

This project is produced by the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and funded by a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation.

How It Works

Scraping (fredscanner.py) — Fetches the latest incident data from frederickscanner.com every 30 minutes via GitHub Actions. New incidents are appended to incidents.csv.
RSS Feed (make_rss.py) — Generates an RSS feed (site/latest.rss) with the 50 most recent incidents and copies the CSV into the site/ directory.
Dashboard (site/index.html) — A static HTML page deployed to GitHub Pages that loads and visualizes the incident data client-side.

Dashboard Features

Search by event type, location, or responding units
Filter by event type and date range
Key metrics: total incidents, average per day, most common event type
7-day and 30-day percentage change indicators
Interactive line chart of incidents over time
Paginated incident records table
RSS feed for the latest incidents

Data

The incident data is stored in incidents.csv with the following columns:

Column	Description
Time	Time of the incident (e.g., “1:17 pm”)
Event	Incident type (e.g., “HOUSE FIRE”, “VEHICLE ACCIDENT - BLS”)
Location	Address or block location
Units	Responding units and radio information
Date	Date in MM/DD/YYYY format
Datetime	ISO-formatted datetime (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS)

Setup

Requirements

Python 3.x
Dependencies: pip install -r requirements.txt

Running Locally

# Scrape latest incidents
python fredscanner.py

# Generate RSS feed and prepare site data
python make_rss.py

The dashboard can be served from the site/ directory using any static file server.

Automation

The GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/scrape.yaml) runs the scraper and RSS generator every 30 minutes and deploys the updated site to GitHub Pages.

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.