Core concepts

Pagination

Cursors, not offsets. On a feed where records arrive while you are reading it, an offset quietly skips records and a cursor does not.

Why not page numbers

Offset pagination assumes the result set holds still. Emergency data does not. If three new incidents arrive between your request for page 1 and your request for page 2, everything shifts down by three and you never see the three that moved across the boundary. Nothing errors. You simply have a gap.

A cursor points at a position in the data rather than a count from the start, so new arrivals cannot shift it.

How to page

Ask for a page. If the response carries a nextCursor, pass it back as cursor to get the next one. When it is absent, you have reached the end.

Request

# first page
curl "https://emergencyapi.com/api/v1/incidents?state=nsw&limit=100" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

# next page, using nextCursor from the previous response
curl "https://emergencyapi.com/api/v1/incidents?state=nsw&limit=100&cursor=eyJ1cGRhdGVkX2F0IjoiMjAyNi0wNy0yNlQwMDowMDowMFoiLCJpZCI6Im5zdy1yZnMtMTIzIn0" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

limit: Records per page. Defaults to 100, maximum 500. A value above the maximum is a 400, not a silent clamp, so you never think you asked for more than you received.
cursor: An opaque base64url token encoding a position. Treat it as opaque: its contents are an implementation detail and a malformed cursor returns 400.
nextCursor: Present only while more records exist. Its absence is the end-of-results signal, so loop until it is missing rather than until a page comes back short.

One correct loop

Stop on the absent cursor, not on an empty page. A full page can legitimately be the last one.

Python

import requests

url = "https://emergencyapi.com/api/v1/incidents"
headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"}
params = {"state": "nsw", "limit": 100}
incidents = []

while True:
    r = requests.get(url, headers=headers, params=params, timeout=30)
    r.raise_for_status()
    body = r.json()
    incidents.extend(body["features"])

    cursor = body.get("nextCursor")
    if not cursor:
        break
    params["cursor"] = cursor

print(f"{len(incidents)} incidents")