By Michael J. Karter and Joseph L. Molis
Each year, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) studies firefighter deaths and injuries to provide national statistics on their frequency, extent, and characteristics. Earlier this year, NFPA reported that 103 firefighters died on duty (see “2007 Firefighter Fatalities,” NFPA Journal July/August 2008).
This report addresses 2007 firefighter injuries in the United States. The results are based on data collected during the 2007 NFPA Survey of Fire Departments for U.S. Fire Experience. An earlier report measured the national fire experience in terms of the number of fires that fire departments attended and the resulting civilian deaths, civilian injuries, and property losses that occurred.
This year’s report includes among its results:
An estimate of the total number of 2007 firefighter injuries.
Estimates of the number of injuries by type of duty.
An estimate of the number of exposures to infectious diseases.
Trends in firefighter injuries and rates.
Fireground injuries by cause.
Fire department vehicle accidents and resulting firefighter injuries.
The average number of fires and fireground injuries per department by the population of the community protected.
Descriptions of selected incidents that illustrate firefighter safety problems.
Based on survey data reported by fire departments, NFPA estimates that 80,100 firefighter injuries occurred in the line of duty in 2007.2 This is a decrease of 4 percent and back to the 2005 level. In recent years, the number of firefighter injuries has been considerably lower than it was in the 1980s and 1990s, but this is due in part to additional questions about exposures, which allow us to place them in their own categories (see Figure 1 ). Previously, some of these exposures may have been included in total injuries under other categories.
NFPA estimates that there were 13,450 exposures to infectious diseases, such as hepatitis, meningitis, HIV, and others in 2007. This amounts to 0.9 exposures per 1,000 emergency medical runs by fire departments in 2007.
NFPA estimates that there were 28,300 exposures to hazardous conditions such as asbestos, radioactive materials, chemicals, fumes, and others in 2007. This amounts to 26.2 exposures per 1,000 hazardous condition runs in 2007.
An estimated 16,350 injuries, or 20.4 percent of all firefighter injuries, resulted in lost time in 2007.
