Updates & roadmap

Fire Analytics, stronger live status & simpler source coverage

• Added a new Explore data view to Incident History with native Fire Radar charts for recorded fires over time, incident type, severity and authority.
• Analytics use aggregated Fire Radar API data from the existing incident archive. No separate analytics server, database product or Hostinger add-on is required.
• Strengthened the shared operational-status engine so conclusion and handover wording such as “incident left with owner”, “awaiting recovery”, “crews left scene”, stop messages and returned-to-station wording can close an incident promptly.
• Introduced shorter active-evidence limits for small vehicle/localised incidents so an old source page cannot make a minor fire appear active for many hours without fresh evidence.
• Redesigned Sources & coverage for mobile and removed public source-quality scores and detailed parser/validation intelligence. Public cards now focus on coverage type, last checked time, Fire Radar archive count and recording-since date.
• Sorted Incident History and Analytics fire-authority selectors alphabetically.
• Self-hosted Umami visitor analytics is unchanged.

Four more regions & clearer source limitations

• Added Hampshire & Isle of Wight Fire and Rescue Service from its official incidents-of-interest archive and detailed incident pages.
• Added Dorset & Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service from its official incidents-of-interest list and detailed pages with date, time, location, description and attending stations.
• Added Avon Fire & Rescue Service from its official Incidents of note page, which explicitly does not publish every incident attended.
• Added Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service from its official notable-incident map/list, which explicitly states it is not a live record of all incidents and calls.
• Cambridgeshire was temporarily removed from enabled coverage because its public incident source appeared stale/broken. Current enabled coverage remained 23 fire and rescue service areas.
• The once-per-version update popup moved to shorter, conversational beta/999/public-source wording.

Cambridgeshire, Cleveland & release update popup

• Added Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service using its official recent-incident list and detailed incident pages, taking account of the service's stated office-hours publication cadence.
• Added Cleveland Fire Brigade using its structured incidents-of-interest table with call/end times, category, location, operational detail, engine count and stations.
• Coverage rises from 18 to 20 enabled fire and rescue service areas, with the same common qualification, status, geocoding and publication-quality rules applied to both new authorities.
• Added a mobile- and desktop-friendly “What's new” popup. It is shown once per release on each browser and a new version gets its own unseen release key.
• Expanded geocoding bounds, locality fallbacks, wind sampling and NASA FIRMS coverage for the new service areas.

Related-news identity hardening

Service update · 6 September 2026: Added privacy-focused, self-hosted Umami traffic analytics so Fire Radar can understand aggregate usage and improve the public beta without advertising or cross-site tracking.

• Automatic third-party news now requires incident-level geographic evidence rather than generic fire wording alone.
• Generic titles such as “Large Field Fire” can no longer match an article from another part of the country simply because both stories contain similar fire terms.
• Previously cached third-party links are revalidated against the current incident and removed when the location identity no longer matches.
• Only high-confidence third-party matches may contribute supplementary evidence to Fire Radar's operational status inference; medium matches remain informational only.
• Added a regression case for the Buckinghamshire/Gatwick false-association class found during public-beta use.

Mobile-first map & clearer public presentation

• On phones, the live map appears immediately after a shorter emergency notice, with summary cards and filters moved below the map.
• Mobile navigation, map controls and status information were tightened so the incident map gets substantially more of the first screen.
• The homepage no longer uses third-party-news coverage as a headline metric; detailed news-discovery status lives on Sources & coverage.
• Search and social metadata were rewritten around a live fire map and fire incident tracker rather than a software version number.
• Archive wording distinguishes the seven-day live-map window from Fire Radar's growing searchable historical database.
• Added the public beta update and roadmap page.

West Sussex, official X ingestion & live-beta fixes

• Added West Sussex Fire & Rescue Service as the 18th enabled authority using its official X account as a selective official source.
• X retrieval uses the authorised API and incremental since_id polling after a bounded initial catch-up, reducing unnecessary paid reads.
• Fixed email sharing so the Fire Radar deep link is included in the message body.
• Removed the misleading duplicate “official incident photo” action when public image embedding is disabled.
• Related-news checking now backs off as incidents age and normally stops for closed non-major fires rather than scheduling pointless retries.

Source reliability & hosted public-beta readiness

• Improved Essex handling so a genuinely empty recent incident window can be reported as healthy rather than mistaken for parser failure.
• Updated Bedfordshire parsing for its current daily-summary layout and improved Merseyside incident location/time handling.
• Retained the Suffolk parser improvements introduced during the hosted deployment work.
• Strengthened source-health checks so unavailable sources and data-quality failures are distinguished rather than silently appearing as zero incidents.
• Continued the PostgreSQL/PostGIS hosted architecture, scheduled ingestion, HTTPS deployment and automated database backups used by the public beta.