About this map

An independent map of emergency incidents attended by the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service, built from the City of Winnipeg’s published open data. It is maintained by Johnathan Drozdowski and is not affiliated with WFPS or the City of Winnipeg.

In an emergency, call 911. This site is not an emergency service and is not monitored.

Where the data comes from

Since 8 August 2023 the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service has published incident information drawn from its computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system, updated every five minutes. This site reads that same published feed — the WFPS Call Logs dataset on the City of Winnipeg Open Data portal — and checks it for new calls every minute. Polling more often than the City publishes does not make the data fresher than its source; it shortens the gap between a call being published and appearing here.

The feed carries an incident number, the incident type, the time of the call, the units dispatched, the neighbourhood, the Council ward, whether the call involved a motor vehicle, and — once the call ends — the time it closed. Nothing else is published, and nothing here is added to it.

Is this PulsePoint?

No. PulsePoint is a separate service operated by the PulsePoint Foundation, a US non-profit. It is not affiliated with this site, and this site is not affiliated with it. Many people arrive here searching for PulsePoint in Winnipeg, so it is worth being clear about the difference.

PulsePoint works by an agency connecting its own computer-aided dispatch system to the PulsePoint platform, which then drives the PulsePoint Respond app — including its CPR-needed alerts. Whether a given agency appears there is that agency’s decision, and nothing on this site can change or reflect it. This map takes the opposite route: it reads the incident feed the City of Winnipeg already publishes as open data, and plots it. No integration, no agency involvement, and no connection to PulsePoint’s data.

The practical differences: this site sends no alerts and does not know where you are; it only shows what the City has published, so it will never be faster than that feed; and it covers Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service calls and nothing else.

Keeping an eye on it

There is no account to make and nothing to sign up for. If you want to check back regularly, there are two ways that do not involve remembering the address:

• Add it to your home screen. The map page will offer this on browsers that support it; on iPhone, use Share → Add to Home Screen. It then opens like an app, straight to the live map.
• Subscribe to the Atom feed in any feed reader. Because an incident changes after it is published — it closes — the feed reports when each entry was first published and when it was last updated.

What “active” means

WFPS treats an incident as active while one or more units are assigned to it and the incident is ongoing. The City’s own incident page shows only active calls: once a call closes it disappears from that page and passes into the historical dataset, which reaches back to 2015.

This map keeps a call visible for 2 hours after it closes, marked Closed with the time units spent on scene, and shows calls from the past 24 hours.

An active call that lists no units at all is counted on the front page as awaiting dispatch, alongside how long the one waiting longest has waited. That is read straight from the feed: the units field is absent until a unit is attached to the incident. Read it as no units are recorded against this call yet rather than as a measured response time — the feed publishes on a five-minute cycle, so a call can already have units on the way before this site can see them, and a call that closes without ever listing a unit is treated as attended by none rather than as still waiting.

What the markers show — and what they do not

The map does not show where an incident happened. The published data locates a call only to a neighbourhood, never to an address. Each marker is drawn at an offset from its neighbourhood’s centre — far enough apart that several calls in one neighbourhood stay legible, and constrained so the marker still falls inside that neighbourhood’s boundary.

That position is deliberately approximate. Read a marker as somewhere in this neighbourhood and nothing finer.

Two values that appear in the feed are not places at all: Outside Winnipeg and Unverified. Neither is ever plotted, because placing them anywhere would invent a location the data does not contain.

The colour categories are this site’s, not WFPS’s

WFPS publishes a free-text incident type. To make the map readable, this site sorts those types into three groups:

• Fire Rescue — types naming a fire, wherever the word appears: “Fire Response”, “Fire Rescue – Alarm”, “Vehicle Fire”. A type reporting that there was no fire — “Alarm – No Fire” — is an alarm call, and stays in Other
• Medical Response — types containing “Medical Response”
• Other — everything else

That grouping is an editorial convenience, not an official classification, and it is coarser than the categories WFPS itself uses. The exact published incident type is always shown in the table.

What this data cannot tell you

• It is not a complete picture of an incident. A call’s type is recorded at dispatch and reflects what was reported, which is not always what responders found.
• Early records can change. The feed’s own Unverified value exists because information at the start of a call is provisional.
• Unit counts are not severity. The number of units dispatched follows dispatch policy for a call type; it is not a measure of how serious an incident is.
• Gaps are possible. If the Open Data portal is unreachable, this page shows the last data successfully retrieved and says so at the top.

How it is built

The source is public on GitHub. It is a Spring Boot application rendering the incident table server-side, with Leaflet and OpenStreetMap tiles for the map. Neighbourhood boundaries come from the City’s own neighbourhood boundary dataset.

Corrections

If something here is wrong — a mistaken description, a marker in the wrong neighbourhood, a misread field — please say so and it will be fixed. Errors in the underlying data need to go to the City of Winnipeg; this site only reproduces what the feed publishes.

← Back to the incident map