Fire incidents are categorised into three different types. These are primary fires, secondary fires and chimney fires. For information on what these categories consist of please visit our page 'Incident Types We Attend'. The information below describes the number and types of fires County Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service has attended in previous years. Please note that in April 2009 the national incident recording system (IRS) was introduced for all fire and rescue services to collect date to their governing body. This new national system required all fire and rescue services to record and submit details of every incident they attend. Prior to April 2009 much less detailed information was submitted. This new system also contains specific guidance on how to categorise incidents. As a result of this greater detail and further guidance some disparity exists between statistics prior and post April 2009. Also, some of the incident subtypes are not the same and IRS contains many more subtypes. The charts below show the previous ten years data since, the data has been aggregated to groups to enable some comparisons to be made.