Where does all the money go? The National Fire Protection Association's report The Total Cost of Fire in the United States is an in-depth study of the nation's fire loss statistics. The report mentions that the total property loss to fire in 2003 was estimated at $14.5 billion, but this was only a small part of the overall fire cost. The report states that for 2003 “total cost is estimated at $226-272 billion, or roughly 2½% of U.S. gross domestic product.” The rate of this hemorrhage that is draining our national economy is relatively small in comparison to the strength of our national industrial output. But a quarter of a trillion dollars in annual costs is a very significant volume that demands serious attention.

To put the magnitude of these statistics in perspective, comparing them to some current significant national issues might be of value. Most don't know, but that average quarter of a trillion dollars is about the same as the total gross domestic product of the 20th-largest economy in the world! Even more interesting is the fact that our total annual fire cost in 2003 was more than 30% higher than the total GDP of the largest oil-producing country in the world, Saudi Arabia. According to the World Bank's 2003 statistics, Saudi Arabia's total GDP for that year was about $189 billion. Think about that the next time you're paying $3 per gallon to fill your gas tank.

From an unbiased, non-partisan and purely statistical view, let's compare our total fire cost statistics to our loss statistics in the Iraq war. Since the start of the war, America has spent more than $350 billion, and we have lost more than 3,000 of our bravest in Iraq. During that same time period, at an annual average rate of $250 billion and 4,000 fire fatalities, we have spent $750 billion on total fire cost and have lost 12,000 people. Next time you watch the national evening news and hear about our losses in Iraq, remember that we are spending more than twice as much on the total fire cost, and our fire fatalities are as much as four times higher, here at home!

Find a solution

Do most Americans realize the extent of our fire problem? I believe that if our representatives on Capitol Hill were aware of the real magnitude of our country's fire cost, they would pay a lot closer attention and address the fire problem in our country. Unfortunately, it seems that year in and year out we continue to accept these high fire loss and fatality statistics, considering them as acceptable risks.

I believe that as Americans it's our national obligation to focus on ways to significantly reduce this unnecessary destruction. In the competitive world of global economics, we must be concerned about such wastes. We need the foresight to look ahead 40 years and recognize that to be competitive in the global economy, we should focus on ways to decrease our total national fire cost. Looking that many years ahead, however, it isn't too farfetched to predict that if we continue our same historical response patterns, the problem will become even worse with the passage of time and the pace of growth.

In 2004, the Insurance Services Office's Effective Fire Protection stated that “U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows that, from 1982 to 1997, 25 million acres of rural land an area the size of Maine and New Hampshire combined became subdivisions, malls, workplaces, and other developments.” Logically, with the tremendous pace of urban development in our country turning rural farms into higher-density developments, it could only be expected that the magnitude of the fire-loss problem would be on the rise for years to come.

As for the NFPA, its examination of fire loss in the United States in 2005 concluded that “with home fire deaths still accounting for 3,030 fire deaths or 82% of all civilian deaths, fire safety initiatives targeted at the home remain the key to any reductions in the overall fire death toll.” Focused on reducing fire fatalities in residential occupancies, the Home Fire Sprinkler Coalition claims that “installing both smoke alarms and a fire sprinkler system reduces the risk of death in a fire home by 82% relative to having neither.”

Eureka! We do indeed know on what and where we should be focusing, and how to reduce 80% of our fire fatalities and decrease our fire loss! Simple, affordable life-saving technologies, such as smoke alarms and residential fire sprinkler systems, have been available for decades. But while smoke alarms are now quite common in our households, with 96% of our homes having them installed, residential fire sprinkler systems have been installed in only 2% of the nation's homes.

Start with ourselves

What are we waiting for? What's holding us back? Why don't we have residential fire sprinkle systems in all newly constructed homes? Why doesn't the fire service put all its support behind installing such life-saving technology in all our new houses? In their book The Leadership Challenge, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner say that “there's absolutely no way that you can convince others, over the long term, to share a dream if you're not convinced of it yourself. You must be sincere in your own belief.” In my mind, to answer these questions we must first start with ourselves. We must full-heartedly believe in the life-safety value of residential fire sprinkler systems before we can preach to others and promote it.

Residential fire sprinkler systems are life-safety systems by intent. They're designed both to save the lives of occupants by increasing the survival window and to avoid flashovers by stopping the fire progression. This would allow the occupants more time to evacuate and save their own lives. Just as important is the fact that fire sprinkler systems also would create a safer environment for responding firefighters during interior search-and-rescue and fire suppression operations. Simply, residential fire sprinkler system technology not only saves occupants' lives but those of our own firefighters, as well. Suppressing the fires in the incipient stages also decreases the adverse economic impacts of fires. Residential fire sprinkler systems save lives and then some.

There is an inventory of around 100 million existing dwellings in our country, so installing residential fire sprinkler systems in the 1.5 million new homes constructed annually might not be considered an immediate solution to our fire problem. But this is the only systematic long-range solution that could reduce total fire fatalities and eventually lower our total annual national fire cost.

Yet our building codes allow construction of new homes without the protection of residential fire sprinkler systems. Just as the lumber industry routinely plants trees to be harvested in the future, the homes that are being constructed today without residential fire sprinkler systems could be where we fight the fires of the future and, unfortunately, where we could compile all our future fire-loss statistics. Closing our eyes to this reality only will prolong this unnecessary destruction.

The fire service must finally recognize that sprinklers save firefighters' lives, too. This fact was clearly underlined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in The Economic Consequences of Firefighter Injuries and Their Prevention from March 2005. This study indicated that non-fatal firefighter injuries cost between $2.8-$7.8 billion per year. This figure is a substantial direct national cost to the fire service that could be reduced drastically if residential fire sprinkler systems were installed in all new homes. The NIST study reviewed prevention methods to reduce the cost, adding that it all “boils down to simple logic: Fight fewer fires.” And considering fire-loss trends and statistics, installing sprinkler systems in all new homes would translate into fighting fewer fires.

We in the fire service sincerely believe in the importance of our mission to reduce fire fatalities and life-scarring fire injuries in our communities. It's just as important for us to believe that it's our professional obligation to acknowledge our responsibility in decreasing our country's total annual fire cost. In its own way, reliance on all available life-saving technologies could only help us accomplish our mission.

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Azarang “Ozzie” Mirkhah is a fire protection engineer with Las Vegas Fire & Rescue. A graduate of the Executive Fire Officer program at the National Fire Academy, Mirkhah has a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering and a master's degree in public administration.