- Author
-
Federal Emergency Management Agency
- Title
- Fire Death Rate Trends: An International Perspective.
- Coporate
- Federal Emergency Management Agency, Washington, DC
- Sponsor
- TriData Corp., Arlington, VA
- Report
-
FA 169
June 1997
22 p.
- Distribution
- AVAILABLE FROM: U.S. Fire Administration (USFA), 16825 South Seton Ave., Emmitsburg, MD 21727. Telephone: 301-447-1000. Website: http://www.usfa.fema.gov
- Contract
- EMW-95-C-4717
- Keywords
-
death
|
fire statistics
|
fire safety
- Identifiers
- international fire picture, 1979-1992; fire in the U.S. - the institutional and cultural context
- Abstract
- The United States historically has had one of the highest fire loss rates of industrialized world - both in terms of fire deaths and dollar loss. This unenviable status has perplexed many experts in the fire world. The United States is health and safety conscious in many areas - uatomobiles, consumer products, food, and medical drugs, to name a few - and has a vast arsenal of technological resources to combat fire. For such a safety conscious and technologically advanced society to be a leader in fire losses is indeed puzzling. This report explores the magnitude and the nature of the U.S.'s fire death problem, and it is divided into sections. The first section presents a statistical portrait of fire death rates for fourteen industrialized countries. Comparisons reveal the magnitude of differences between the U.S., Japan, and a selection of European countries in fire death rates. Trends in overall rates and differences between countries are also explored. The second section of this report presents observations about key institutional and attidudinal differences between the U.S. and industrialized countries with significantly lower fire death rates. Allocations of fire fighting resources and different cultural attitudes regarding the "acceptability" of fire are addressed in this section.