- Author
- U.S. Fire Administration
- Title
- Highlights of Fire in the United States. Deaths, Injuries, Dollar Loss, and Incidents at the National, State, and Local Levels in 1978. 2nd Edition.
- Coporate
- U.S. Fire Administration, Washington, DC
- Report
- FEMA-22, July 1982, 192 p.
- Keywords
- statistics | death | injuries | costs | arson | smoke detectors | sprinklers | fire losses
- Identifiers
- fire incidents; civilian fire deaths; civilian fire injuries; firefighter casualties; property losses from fires; socioeconomic characteristics and fire patterns: a cast study of Toledo
- Abstract
- The United States continues to face major fire problems. Each year fire causes thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands of injuries, and billions of dollars worth of property damage throughout the Nation. The U.S. fire incidence and fire death rates per capita are among the highest in the industrialized world. Developing effective ways to prevent and reduce U.S. fire losses requires a continuing examination of the magnitude and characteristics of the fire problem-where fires occur, what causes them, and who the victims are. This kind of understanding is essential for fire protection agencies to zero in on problems and use their resources as efficiently as possible to combat those problems. This report, compiled and published by the National Fire Data Center of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is the second edition of Fire in the United States, an analysis of the Nation's fire problem. FEMA's responsibility includes providing assistance to fire departments and state fire service organizations in identifying the major causes of fire losses for better fire protection planning and management, determining the magnitude of the national problem and monitoring the progress of programs to reduce fire loss. Each edition of Fire in the United States offers an analysis of national fire data and discusses its implications for fire prevention and control. This report is based on data supplied by the 15 states in FEMA's National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) which submitted a full year's data for 1978, a significant increase over the two states' data used in the first edition. The expanded participation in NFIRS increased the base of information available for use in this report, allowing a better understanding of the specific characteristics of the Nation's fire problems. The NFIRS data base used for much of the analysis in this report included more than 1,000,000 incidents (440,000 from 1978 alone). By April 1981, 38 states plus the District of Columbia were at various stages of development in NFIRS. NFIRS was established to improve uniformity in fire incident reporting, and to ensure that data is useable for fire protection planning and manage-ment at the national, state and local levels.