- Author
-
Federal Emergency Management Agency
- Title
- Fire in the United States 1995-2004.
- Coporate
- Federal Emergency Management Agency, Washington, DC
- Report
-
FA 311; 14th Edition,
August 2007,
77 p.
- Keywords
-
fire statistics
|
fire data
|
statistics
|
NFIRS
|
methodology
|
costs
|
casualties
|
fire losses
|
structures
|
residential buildings
|
building fires
|
one-family dwelling
|
two-family dwellings
|
apartments
|
fire departments
|
fire fighters
|
fire fighting
|
informaiton dissemination
|
injuries
|
surveys
- Identifiers
- national problem; regional and state profiles; residences and other properties; causes of fires and fire losses; race, age and gender characteristics of victims; differences between NFPA and NFIRS estimates; fire casualties by population group; kinds of properties where fires occurr; vehicles and other mobile properties; outside and other properties; states reporting fire incidents to NFIRS (1995-2004); fire departments reporting to NFIRS in 2004; NFIRS fire incident data reporting by version (percent); comparison of percentage change indicators; hierarchy of cause Ggoupings used in this report; distribution of fire casualties by gender
- Abstract
- Fire departments in the United States respond to nearly 1.8 million fire calls each year.The U.S.fire problem, on a per capita basis, is one of the worst in the industrial world.Thousands of Americans die each year, tens of thousands of people are injured, and property losses reach billions of dollars.There are huge indirect costs of fire as well - temporary lodging, lost business, medical expenses, psychological damage, and others.These indirect costs may be as much as 8 to 10 times higher than the direct costs of fire.To put this in context, the annual losses from floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters combined in the United States average just a fraction of those from fires.The public, the media, and local governments generally are unaware of the magnitude and seriousness of the fire problem to individuals and their families, to communities, and to the Nation. The National Fire Data Center (NFDC) of the U S Fire Administration (USFA) periodically publishes Fire in the United States-a statistical overview of the fires in the United States with the focus on the latest year in which data were available at the time of preparation This report is designed to arm the fire service and others with information that motivates corrective action, sets priorities, targets specific fire programs, serves as a model for State and local analyses of fire data, and provides a baseline for evaluating programs This 14th edition covers the 10-year period 1995 to 2004 with a primary focus on 2004 For the first time, only native National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) 5 0 data are used for NFIRS-based analyses The report addresses the overall national fire problem Detailed analyses of the residential and non-residential fire problem, firefighter casualties, and other subsets of the national fire problem are not included These topic-specific analyses will be addressed as separate, stand-alone publications. The primary source of data is from NFIRS National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) annual survey results, mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), data from State Fire Marshals' offices or their equivalents, population data from the U S Census Bureau, and inflation adjustments from the Bureau of Labor Statistic's Consumer Price Index also are used Because of the time it takes for States to submit data to USFA from the thousands of fire departments that participate in NFIRS, then edit and obtain corrections, and analyze and display the results, the publication lags behind the date of data collection Fortunately, the fire problem does not change very rapidly, so the data usually are quite representative of the situation in the year of publication as well.