- Author
- Fire Administration
- Title
- Fire in the United States, 1992-2001.
- Coporate
- U.S. Fire Administration, Washington, DC
- Sponsor
- TriData Corp., Arlington, VA
- Report
- FA 286; 13th Edition, October 2004, 200 p.
- Distribution
- **Copies of this report are available by writing: U.S. Fire Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Publications Center, 16825 South Seton Avenue, Emmitsburg, MD 21727 **Documents may also be ordered on the World Wide Web: http://www.usfa.fema.gov/applications/publications
- Keywords
- fire statistics | fire data | residential buildings | fire fighters | casualties | NFIRS | methodology | fire losses | apartments | motor vehicles | fire death | injuries
- Identifiers
- national fire problem; residential properties; on-residential properties; differences between NFPA and NFIRS estimates; data supporting selected fire and loss charts
- Abstract
- Fire departments in the United States respond to nearly 2 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, pets killed, 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 are generally 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 running 10-year 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 Thirteenth Edition covers the 10-year period from 1992 to 2001, with emphasis on 2001. The primary source of data is from the National Fire Incident Reporting System (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, and statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Consumer Price Index are also 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 the date of data collection. Fortunately, the fire problem does not change very rapidly so the data are usually quite representative of the situation in the year of publication as well.