Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Published statistics from various sources are brought together in this paper to evaluate the chance of an outbreak of fire in different occupancies, and the chance that a fire becomes large. Yearly variations in these data are used to measure the effectiveness of fire prevention and fire protection in these occupancies. They suggest that increasing annual fire losses are due in the Manufacturing Industries mainly to an increase in the number of outbreaks of fire, and in the Distributive Trades mainly to an increase in the cost of individual fires.