Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

The frequency of all residential fires attended by the Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade is routinely recorded and hence well known. However, the frequency of residential fires which are not attended by the Fire Brigade, including instances where the occupant of a dwelling or some other person has extinguished the fire or the fire has self-extinguished, has previously remained unknown. This paper has two aspects; (i) it describes a newly developed questionnaire for collecting relevant data on an unattended or attended residential fire experience throughout an individual’s lifetime, and (ii) it reports a probability finding based on 473 adults sampled from the western region of Melbourne, Australia. Findings from the Fire Safety Awareness and Experience Questionnaire show the mean annual probability of having a fire experience (either attended and unattended) while an adult (aged over 18 years) was .012, meaning that, within this sample, the adults had on average one fire experience every 83.3 adult years.