Fire Safety and Fireworks

8/3/2022 (Permalink)

With the warmer months of the summer comes times to celebrate events with barbeques, family events and everyone’s favorite firework displays. These times where we use fireworks for celebrations do we take the necessary safety precautions to prevent injury or property damage needed? In all years studied, Independence Day has more incidents reported in NFIRS than any other day of the year. The number of incidents in the NFIRS database associated with July 4 and July 5 were 2.4 times the average daily number of incidents on other days of the year. Brush and outside fire incidents were nearly four times higher during this holiday than on the average day. Structure fires increase on July 4 and July 5th as well. As would be expected, fireworks were responsible for a considerable portion of the increase in fire incidence on Independence Day. In fact, 31 percent of the total annual number of fireworks−related fires occurs on July 4 and 5. These fires individually were less severe than fires generally, with lower average dollar loss per fire, less than half of the injuries and one third the deaths per fire.