Statisticians Save Thousands of Lives By Switching Tactics
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For years, fire departments have searched for a magic program that would drastically reduce the number of fire deaths in the nation when the key to success was to change the statistical methods.
Administrator Howard D. Tipton of the National Fire Prevention and Control Administration reported to the New England Association of Fire Chiefs annual conference last June that the NFPCA’s National Fire Incident Reporting System had determined—on the basis of seven states participating in the system—that the national fire death toll was 7500—a drop of 4500 from the traditional 12,000, give or take a couple of hundred.
President Carter included the 7500 figure in his Fire Prevention Week proclamation published last September.
At the fall conference of the International Society of Fire Service Instructors in Atlanta last. October, Joseph Clark, NFPCA associate administrator for fire safety and research, declared that the “magic number of 12,000 (fire deaths) is a thing of the past. We know and realize the number is around 8,000,” give or take 500.
Now the National Fire Protection Association, which fathered the 12,000 figure during the last several years, has become a convert to a new statistical approach and has announced that “about 8800 persons died during 1976 as a result of fires in the United States.”
The NFPA explained that it had taken another look at its estimates of motor vehicle deaths, which had been based on a 1951 study done at the National Office of Vital Statistics. This study stated that 7.8 percent of all motor vehicle deaths involved burns. The NFPA said that research done by Peter Cooley of the Highway Safety Research Institute at the University of Michigan showed that only 1 to 1.5 percent of motor vehicle deaths were fire-related. As a result, the NFPA fed this information into the development of its 1976 fire death statistics.
There could be some double counting, the NFPA explained, because it “allowed for deaths that often go unreported to municipal fire departments, such as those caused by clothing ignitions, mine explosions, forest fires, and nonhighway transportation fires. . . . Consequently, the 8800 estimate should be taken as the maximum number of U. S. fire deaths during 1976.”
