Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Data are presented which show that the chance pL of a fire becoming large (e.g. fire loss greater than £10 000) is correlated with the chance pS of fires spreading beyond the room of origin, so that approximately PL = PS3 A simple stochastic model of fire spread supports this correlation, and indicates that the observed large fires correspond on average to fires involving four or more rooms (a result which is supported by other observed data.) This correlation shows that the probability of spread beyond the room of origin is a useful measure of the chance of a fire becoming large and suggests that large fires as a group may be studied by research on those factors which influence whether fires spread beyond the room of origin. This is of considerable practical importance because there are many more data on smaller fires.