Fire

Each day the city makes one roll for a new fire. The chance scales with how many buildings you have, so a bigger city sees more fires on average even though every individual building is still very unlikely to burn on any given day. The base monthly rate on this page is taken from FDNY records. A heatwave event multiplies that base rate by five for as long as the event lasts, so summer is more dangerous than winter.

Once a building is on fire, its fire intensity climbs one step per day. If a building reaches sixteen steps it collapses into rubble that you will have to demolish later. Every active fire also has a small chance to spread to a neighbor each day, one percent in normal weather and five percent during a heatwave. Spread is independent of the fire department response, so a long-burning fire can seed new fires even before the brigade arrives.

How fire departments actually respond

Every fire station hires firefighters from the local workforce. The whole-city response capacity each day is the integer division of your total firefighters by the per-incident floor on this page. The standard reference for that floor is NFPA 1710, which calls for 15 firefighters per structure fire. So a city with 14 firefighters has zero response capacity, because 14 divided by 15 rounds down to zero. Hire one more and the same city goes from “no response” to “one response per day” in a single step.

Each available response is dispatched to a fire that has been burning long enough to need help (currently more than eight days), regardless of which station the firefighters came from. There is no priority queue across simultaneous fires: if more burning buildings qualify than the city has response capacity that day, the excess go unattended. The response costs the fire budget a fixed amount per incident. Departments below the threshold still draw their salaries every month, so you are paying for trucks that physically cannot roll out.

Salaries

This page also lists the firefighter monthly salary. That bill lands whether your trucks are on call or sitting idle.

Your levers

• Build stations, which opens hiring slots.
• Fill those slots from your adult workforce.
• Build a City Hall, which improves fire department coordination across stations.
• Watch the firefighter count as your city grows. Dropping below the per-incident floor is the most common quiet failure. Your population grew, your building count grew, and the daily fire roll started landing on buildings the department cannot reach.

Parameters

Fire response cost

$25,000

Average cost incurred by fire departments for responding to a single fire incident. This cost includes expenses related to personnel, equipment usage, and other operational costs associated with firefighting efforts.

⚠️ Source pending

Fire rate month

0.022

Monthly probability of a random building catching fire. This rate is used to simulate fire incidents in the city. Fire departments will respond to these incidents and prevent buildings from burning down.

Source: Fire Department of New York City (FDNY)

Minimum firefighters per response

15

Minimum number of firefighters required to respond to a single structure fire alarm. Cities with fewer total firefighters than this threshold suffer reduced fire response effectiveness.

Source: NFPA Standard 1710

Firefighter monthly

$5,164

The monthly salary paid to each firefighter. This amount is deducted from the city’s funds each month for every active firefighter.

Source: FDNY