Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

For some years the numbers of fires thought by Fire Brigades to have been started by children have, with some fluctuations, shown signs of increasing. A curve of the annual frequencies from 1956 to 1964 is given in Figure 1. The high figure shown for 1959 is characteristic of all fire frequency curves and is undoubtedly strongly associated with long, dry summer experienced in that year. There is, however, no doubt of the general upward trend and in 1964 the total was greater even than that of 1959. It is not only in actual frequencies that the upward trend appears and, as may be seen from Figure 2, fires attributed to children are forming an increasingly large proportion of the total fires attended by Brrigades in the United Kingdom; by 1964 about 27 per cent of fires attended were attributed to this cause. To throw further light on these figures a study has been made of fire reports received during one year. As data were readily available in a useful form for 1962, statistics for that year were used in the investigation.