Fire in the United States

Fire departments in the United States responded to nearly 1.6 million fire calls in 2007. The United States 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 equip 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 Fifteenth Edition covers the 5-year period of 2003 to 2007 with a primary focus on 2007. Only native National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) 5.0 data are used for NFIRS-based analyses. In 2007, the native NFIRS 5.0 data account for 98 percent of the fire incident data. The report addresses the overall national fire problem.