In 2025, fire departments serving North Merrick responded to 80 fire and hazmat incidents . Here's the full picture.
Cooking fire, confined to container lead by count. Building fires lead by dollars. Together the top five categories make up about 91% of all calls.
Oct peaks. Aug dips. Watch for the typical fall climb starting in October.
310 incidents 2021–2025. Peak year was 2024.
| Year | Incidents | YoY | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021* | 2 | — | |
| 2022 | 63 | — | |
| 2023 | 66 | +4.8% | |
| 2024 | 99 | +50.0% | |
| 2025 | 80 | -19.2% |
* Well below North Merrick's usual volume. That almost always means one or more departments didn't submit a full year to NFIRS, not that fires dropped, so no year-over-year change is shown for it.
For the 0 building fires North Merrick departments responded to in 2025, here's how they were classified once investigators were finished.
Per-capita rates let us compare apples to apples. North Merrick sits below the national average for incidents per resident.
Top 25 wildfires (1992+) in the FPA-FOD ignitions database, scaled by acres. 13,573 acres burned in this 50-mile radius. Each dot is a fire — bigger dots burned more land.
| Year | Cause | Acres | Distance | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | Arson/incendiarism | 5,050 | 48.0 mi | |
| 1995 | Equipment and vehicle use | 1,000 | 33.5 mi | |
| 2012 | Arson/incendiarism | 992 | 40.2 mi | |
| 2016 | Recreation and ceremony | 641 | 43.8 mi | |
| 2016 | Recreation and ceremony | 552 | 48.1 mi | |
| 2001 | Arson/incendiarism | 485 | 49.5 mi | |
| 2012 | Smoking | 481 | 47.2 mi | |
| 2010 | Firearms and explosives use | 475 | 42.9 mi | |
| 2006 | Missing data/not specified/undetermined | 450 | 43.7 mi | |
| 1999 | Recreation and ceremony | 410 | 46.0 mi | |
| 2013 | Recreation and ceremony | 363 | 32.1 mi | |
| 1997 | Arson/incendiarism | 350 | 44.2 mi |
Top 2 ZIP codes by NFIRS incident count across 2021–2025. Each ZIP has its own fire profile — dive in for neighborhood-level context.
Six New York cities with population within ±25% of North Merrick. Useful comparison targets — same state, similar size, different fire profile.
1 departments report to NFIRS for incidents in North Merrick.
A 30-minute weekend can cut your home's exposure substantially. These four checklists are a good starting point.
Numbers reflect incidents reported by participating fire departments to the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) Public Data Release for calendar year 2025. NFIRS is voluntary — about 23,000 of roughly 30,000 US fire departments report — so totals are a strong indicator, not a complete census. Per-capita comparisons use 2023 ACS population estimates. Wildland fire data complements NFIRS with NIFC and USFS perimeters. Active-fire counts come from a dated NIFC snapshot, not a live feed.