Fire hotspots in Edmonton, 2024

Author

Matt Ashby

Published

04 October 2026

ImportantThis is an example report used for teaching purposes

This is an example report used to help students understand how different types of report can be created using the Quarto markup language and the R programming language. The contents of this report should not be relied upon for operational use.

This report has been prepared for Edmonton Fire Rescue Services (EFRS) to identify hotspot locations for fires in the city of Edmonton during the calendar year 2024. This report is based on the EFRS Fire Response dataset. The information in this dataset is recorded by EFRS staff while co-ordinating the response to each incident. The large volume of incidents and rapid pace of operations in a fire control room mean it is likely the data will contain some errors, but it is not possible to quantify these or assess how they might affect the conclusions drawn in this report. However, it is likely the majority of recording errors are effectively random, and so are unlikely to bias this analysis towards a particular conclusion.

Between 1 January and 31 December 2024, EFRS responded to a total of 86,815 incidents, with an average of 237 per day. Of those, 58% were classified as medical, 17% as alarms, 12% as fire, 7% as motor vehicle incident, 3% as other, and 3% as citizen assist (e.g. animal rescue or person trapped in a lift). The rest of this report will focus on the 12% of incidents that were categorised as fires.

Figure 1: Locations of calls to fires in Edmonton, 2024
Density map of calls to fires in Edmonton in 2024, showing only locations with more fires than expected by chance. Darker red represents greater concentration, strongest in a small downtown area. District boundaries provide context; unshaded areas are not identified as significant concentrations.

Figure 1 shows locations in the city of Edmonton with more fires than would be expected by chance. The map shows that fires are very heavily concentrated in a small area in downtown Edmonton. There were 2,236 fires within 1 kilometre of this point in 2024, around 21% of all fires in Edmonton in that period. This is despite that area being only 0.4% of the area of the city.

Figure 2: Locations of calls to fires in downtown Edmonton, 2024
Detailed density map of fire calls in downtown Edmonton in 2024. Significant concentrations occur around Downtown and Boyle Street and along the 107th Avenue corridor. Darker red indicates greater concentration, and numbered boxes locate Edmonton Fire Rescue Services stations relative to these areas.

Figure 2 shows the places within downtown Edmonton with more fires than would be expected by chance. This shows that fires are concentrated around the Downtown and Boyle Street neighbourhoods, as well as along the 107th Avenue corridor.

Figure 3: Frequency of different types of fire in Edmonton, 2024
Horizontal bar chart ranks Edmonton fire types by their recorded counts in 2024. Outdoor fires have by far the longest bar, accounting for more than two thirds of fires. Residential structure fires are the most common structure fires. Percentage labels supplement the count axis.

Figure 3 shows the number of fires of each type that were recorded as occurring in Edmonton in 2024. More than two thirds of fires were outdoor fires, e.g. a fire caused by a lightning strike or illegal burning of rubbish. The majority of structure fires were in residential structures.

Figure 4 shows where the four most-common types of fire concentrated. All panels use the same colour scale, allowing direct comparison of estimated densities between fire types. Outside fires are heavily concentrated downtown, while the other types of fire are more widely distributed. While 45% of outside fires assigned to a district occurred in the Central district (one of 15 districts in Edmonton), the district with the highest proportion of residential structure fires had only 18% of assigned residential structure fires. Table 1 shows the number of fires of each type in each district. District counts and percentages exclude 35 fires that could not be assigned to exactly one district interior, so each counted fire belongs to only one district. These fires remain included in the city-wide maps and fire-type totals.

Figure 4: Locations of calls to different types of fire in Edmonton, 2024
Four density maps compare the most common Edmonton fire types in 2024. Darker red marks greater concentrations among cells with more fires than expected by chance. Outside fires have a strong downtown concentration; the other types are more widely spread. Panel labels identify fire types and a shared legend explains concentration.
Table 1: Number of fires of each type in each Edmonton district, 2024
type of fire
outside residential structure vegetation/ woodland other structure vehicle explosion other non-structure
Central 3,405 227 203 201 32 8 0
Ellerslie 43 24 20 6 21 0 0
Horse Hill 13 4 14 6 4 0 0
Jasper Place 523 87 51 51 36 3 0
Mill Woods and Meadows 291 119 39 32 25 1 2
North Central 798 140 119 86 27 2 1
Northeast 438 175 118 41 35 3 4
Northwest 411 127 59 43 40 3 0
Rabbit Hill 1 1 4 1 4 0 0
Scona 754 97 84 74 11 1 0
Southeast 324 65 66 47 36 1 0
Southwest 42 64 14 11 14 1 0
West Edmonton 189 44 36 16 15 0 1
West Henday 75 32 55 11 22 0 0
Whitemud 177 77 35 11 24 0 0
Edmonton 7,484 1,283 917 637 346 23 8
Column shading shows number of fires