State Fire Marshal - OFIRMS-NERIS Integration

Background: This is the API that allows Fire Prevention to submit fire service incidents to the National Emergency Response Information System (NERIS). This has changed from the normal submission of NFIRS reporting this year and was just finalized over the past 2 months. There is a 12/01/2025 deadline for this project as Ohio is in FEMA District 5 and will be onboarding their fire department in December of this year. To be FEMA compliant, 2026 incidents are required to go into the NERIS system.

The United States Fire Administration is tasked with collecting the nation’s fire incident reports.  Direct federal grants for fire departments depends on this reporting of their data to the United States Fire Administration.  This has historically been the responsibility of the State Fire Marshal office.  Due to the recent change for NFIRS to NEIRS, the United States Fire Administration is requiring a change in the way this data is reported.  Due to this change, we are required to alter our system to comply with their new NERIS requirements for reporting. Making this change allows the State Fire Marshal’s office as well as all Fire Departments across Ohio to be eligible for federal grants.

Design Description:
1. The design automatically uploads the following Incidents from OFIRMS to NERIS.
a. The status of the Incidents is “OFIRMS Submitted”
b. The Incident source can be Import, Portal, IOS or Android (All sources).
2. The upload process is continuous. No manual interventions is required for the Incidents without any errors.
3. Multiple parallel process will be implemented to upload incidents. The estimated number of parallel processes is 10 as of now.
4. The processes will be executed on a separate Instance to ensure that there is no impact on the existing processes.
5. Retry mechanism: The process will have built in retry mechanism.
a. The retry mechanism is useful for situations when there is a planned or unplanned NERIS API downtime.
b. The system will pause the upload process if a downtime is detected automatically due to failure.
c. The system will allow the admin to pause the upload process manually.