Fire Department Attended and Unattended Fires: Estimates from the 2004-2005 National Sample Survey and Comparison with Previous Surveys

摘要

Previous national surveys in 1974 and 1984 have shown that although attended and unattended fires differed substantially in severity and fire losses, there were between 10 and 29 unwanted residential fires for every fire reported to, or atten ded by, U.S. fire departments. The study objective was to obtain new estimates of fires not attended by fire departments. Interest in unattended fires derives from the understanding that most fires begin small, then unless controlled, grow until fire department assistance is needed. To update these analyses, a national telephone sur vey was conducted during 2004 and 2005. The survey had 916 respondents who reported one or more residential fires during the previous 90-day period. The princi pal methodological issues in analyzing the survey data included: (1) determining the optimum recall period to balance sampling variance and bias, and (2) imputing incompletely specified fire dates. The resulting estimates were 7.2 million unattended residential fires per year, a 69% decrease from the 1984 survey estimate of 22.9 mil lion fires. During the same time period, fire department attended residential fires decreased by 36%. The greater decrease in unattended fires is at variance with the conjecture in the 1984 survey that increasing availability of smoke alarms would result in more fires detected at an earlier stage when they could be controlled by resi dents; a conjecture that would predict a greater decrease in attended rather than unattended fires.