Do SF Fire Fighters Only Fight Fire?

Where are the calls to the SFFD being processed? When do they get most number of calls?

Context

Below is a map of San Francisco showing the regions where different battalions (01 through 10) operate. Battalion 99 shows up in the dataset but I have not come across any other information about it. It is, however, still present in the heatmap.

Source: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4f/fa/ec/4ffaec121b921f58a69ba5fae64d7a72.jpg

D3 Implementation

Created By: Pezanne Khambatta
Source: https://data.sfgov.org/Public-Safety/Fire-Department-Calls-for-Service/nuek-vuh3

Interactivity

The heatmap allows for details-on-demand via the help of a tooltip. Hover over any cell to get more information, namely Time of Call, Battalion, Daily Avg. no. of Calls and Total no. of Calls.

Tableau Prototype

Modifications from Prototype

It is worth mentioning that I decided to make the title more descriptive. "Incident Time" now correctly reads as "Time of Call". The legend now shows a range of total values and not daily average.

Warning

The heatmap excludes calls of type 'medical incident'

Instruction & Data Encoding

The heatmap encodes Battalions on the y-axis and Time of Call on the x-axis. The color of the cells represents the total number of calls for that cell.

It shows the total number of service calls during each hour of the day. The values range from 3 calls to 700 calls in a given hour. The hourly values are mapped against the battalion (headquarters) dealing with the call.

Data Wrangling

The original dataset has been used for this visualization with filter on received time. The dataset has been narrowed down to calls during 2019 fiscal year. Report time, battalion and No. of reports have been used as data.

Medical related calls types have been excluded from the data, since they made B02 and B03 stand out in stark contrast against the others.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it appears that battalions B02 and B03 handle a considerably larger number of service calls than the rest. B99 on the other hand, handles considerably fewer. It can also be seen that between 1am and 7am are when the least service calls are made, which makes logical sense. 10pm to 2pm and 4pm to 8pm are most busy times.