Alexander Baxevanis

The New York City Fire Department responded to 41,000 fires in calendar year 2017.

One night last summer my family and I were driving back to our neighborhood when we saw a thick, black plume of smoke spreading across the sky. It was coming from about two blocks south of our house. The streets were clogged with emergency vehicles, their lights flashing, and sirens sounded as additional equipment rolled in. It seemed like the whole block was on fire. In fact, it was just one house.

The next day the property was tidily boarded up. The impact on the neighborhood was minimal—same as the previous summer, when a fire chewed up a decent part of my neighbor’s back room, or that fall, when my teenage son had to call 911 because our oven caught fire. Two much more serious house fires on surrounding blocks in the previous five years didn’t seem to have much effect either, beyond their impact on the families who lived at those addresses. Those blazes did blanket the neighborhood in smoke and leave charred remains behind, but they were nothing like the Halloween 2009 fire that wiped out 10 stores on our major commercial strip, Bainbridge Avenue, nor the arson fire a few months later that zapped a diner, bank and supermarket.

The point is, fire is not as big a force in the city as it was 40 years ago, but it is still a factor in the life of neighborhoods and families. It can still cause stunning tragedy and mass displacement. It can still shape the trajectory of individual families, and sometimes of blocks or neighborhoods.

OpenData NYC offers an incident-by-incident account of every fire incident in the city over the past several years. Below is a look at which community districts saw the most incidents, and what kinds of incidents caused the most action.