ICS209

ISC209s are forms submitted to the Federal Government to describe emergencies. St. Dennis et al have published code to clean and harmonize historical ICS209 data (their project is called ICS209-PLUS), but only publish the resulting data through 2020. To recreate and extend their procedure, we need to obtain the raw ICS209 summaries from USFS. The current year and historical summaries are kept separately.

"Current year" apparently means fires that occur or are still occurring in the current year, so in order to capture a hypothetical fire that ends on 12/31 we should be running the updated daily (or, at the very least, yearly on the last day of the year).

Historical Summaries

1999 - 2023 are available as MS Access EXEs here: https://www.wildfire.gov/application/sit209. When run, each file will open a popup asking where to save the access db files. Unfortunately, it does not appear to be simple to automate the extraction of these files, but their date will be made available here and kept up to date.

Extracting with WINE

Don't have access to a Windows machine to run EXE files? Use WINE on Linux or OSX.

For each file, you'll need to run $ wine the_file.exe at the terminal and extract the files to the "Z:\" drive, which points to your actual root directory (as opposed to the "C:\Documents" folder in WINE, which is part of the Windows Emulator (I know, WINE Is Not an Emulator, but whatever).

Grab a cup of coffee, put on a podcast, and do that for a bit. Next you can install mdbtools to deal with the mdb files. The Hmisc package has a nice mdb.get function that uses that library to pull everything into R.

For current year data, you'll need to obtain approval to access the FAMWEB database from USFS IT. I contacted the contact for FAMWEB listed on wildfire.gov.

Current Year Summaries

You can access current year summaries at https://famdwh-dev.nwcg.gov/sit209/cognos_report_queries/sit209_data_report. Ask your contact at USFS IT to provide the current credentials, or contact me.