Fire Incidents

NFPA report – Fire loss in the United States

Year	Outside	Structure	Vehicle
1980	1,400	1,000	470
1990	1,000	650	450
2000	900	550	350
2010	700	500	220
2020	600	500	220

As with most well-defined problems and risks, the incidence or occurrence of fires has declined through time. In the last 40 years, the incident rate has been cut in half for outside, structure and vehicle fires. The US population grew by 45%, from 227M to 330M during this period. Hence, the incident rate per person declined by 70%.

Fire Deaths

Fire-related Fatalities and Injuries – Injury Facts (nsc.org)

Year	Deaths	US Pop (M)	Deaths/M
1978	7,500	223	34
1988	5,800	245	24
1998	3,900	276	14
2008	3,600	304	12
2018	3,600	327	11

Fire deaths have been cut in half over the last 50 years. The population has increased by 47%. The number of fire deaths per million has decreased by two-thirds, from 34 to just 11.

Real Cost of Fires Per Person

Archived Tables | III

US Population by Year (multpl.com)

Consumer Price Index, 1913- | Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (minneapolisfed.

Year	Nominal Cost $B	2019 Real Cost/Person
1999	12	69
2000	14	72
2001	17	87
2002	18	88
2003	21	102
2004	17	81
2005	21	93
2006	20	87
2007	24	101
2008	31	121
2009	28	110
2010	20	78
2011	20	72
2012	24	86
2013	19	66
2014	22	75
2015	20	67
2016	24	78
2017	37	116
2018	47	146
2019	37	113

While the incident and deaths figures show a clear pattern of significant decline from 1980 to 2010, with relative stability from 2010 to 2020, the real cost of fires per person has much greater annual variability and a less certain trend in the last 20 years. Using 1990-2016 as the time period, the trend is clearly downward, from $90 to $80 per person per year. Adding the last 3 years, with their higher costs, the trend line moves upward from $80 to $100 per person per year.

Overall, the cost of fires per person is flat in the last 20 years, even though the outside incident rate has declined by one-third, the vehicle fire rate has declined by one-third and the structure rate has declined by 10%. Clearly, structure fires have the greatest weight on the cost measure. The unusually high costs in the last 3 years must be driven by a greater number of very high cost incidents.