Stateside Comment
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4 | May 2013 | www.fire–magazine.com
In the first of our regular ‘Stateside’ columns, FIRE’s US Correspondent Catherine Levin starts off with a subject close to her heart: community safety
L
et me confess my weakness: I care deeply about community fire safety and what influences behaviour change. I was the faceless civil servant behind the 2008 joint DCLG and BERR publication Safer Houses: Celebrating 20 years of Fire Prevention in the Home. I will show this publication to anyone who shows a vague interest in the subject, because it matters. It matters where we have come from in the fire and rescue sector but it matters even more where we go next. Safer Houses predicted that the future was local; that fire safer cigarettes would reduce fire deaths and that more had to be done on fire protection and with sprinklers in particular. And yes, the future has turned out to indeed be local; the first ten months since the introduction of fire safer cigarettes has shown a marked drop in the number of smoking related deaths (early days, but significant); but the future is also more cash strapped, so convincing anyone to go beyond building regulations with fire protection and sprinklers is a tough ask. Plot the history of community fire safety in the US and you will find a different lexicon and a different set of milestones. Knowing about the 1947 President’s Conference on Fire Prevention, the America Burning Report of 1973 or the more recent US branch of the Institute of Fire Engineers’ Vision 20/20 initiative are prerequisites for understanding how the US uses public policy as a tool to prevent and mitigate the effects of fire. Truman thought that fire was a big enough issue just after World War II to call for
a conference to address why 10,000 US citizens died annually in fires when the population stood at 141 million in 1946. By 2011 the US population had more than doubled to 310 million but there were 70 per cent fewer civilian fire fatalities. What happened? What influenced this substantial reduction? In January 2013, the Fire Department of New York proudly announced its lowest ever number of fire deaths – which at 58 for 2012 put it pretty much on a par with London, with its similar-sized population – and saw cigarettes as the number two cause of fatal fires after electrical faults. It is ten years since the New York State legislation was enacted to establish ‘ignition propensity’ standards for cigarettes but it took until July 2011 for all 50 states to adopt the same approach. The US Fire Administration reported 390 residential building smoking-related fire deaths in 2008 with a reduction to 350 by 2010, so it is certainly going in the right direction, with cigarettes now accounting for 14 per cent of fire deaths in residential buildings. Changing the production process for cigarettes is one way to impact fire deaths. It is significant and hard fought here and in Europe, but it is not enough. The UK government and the US Fire Administration are both looking at better fire safety measures in the kitchen through improved cooker technology. We need to see innovation and a drive from the UK and US governments to develop targeted hard safety measures because changing behaviour is the longer road and we will never get to the end.