A Retrospective Analysis of The Causes of Industrial Fires in Istanbul Occurring Between 2015 and 2020

Abstract

This study was conducted to analyze the causes of industrial fires that occurred in Istanbul from 2015 to the first half of 2020. An official application was made to the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Fire Brigade Department, which has archive data on this subject, to conduct the research and a sample set was created by filtering industrial fires from the data pool obtained after the approval of the application. In the analysis phase of the 4600 industrial fire data reached, the distributions of the fires according to years, the intended use of the property where the fire took place, the cause of the fire and the district where the fire took place were examined using the Chi-square analysis method. SPSS 22 software package was used in the analysis and the level of significance was determined as 0.05. The examination of the results of the analysis indicated that the leading cause of industrial fires in Istanbul between 2015 and 2020 was electrical equipment with a rate of 44.8%. Electrical equipment was followed by hot work equipment, heating equipment, cigarettes, flammable and explosive chemicals, cooking equipment and arson, respectively. In the study, the reasons of the fires obtained as a result of the analysis of the data were examined, a comparison with the US industrial fire statistics was made and recommendations for improving data and preventing the recurrence of industrial fires were made. In addition, it was emphasized that robust statistics on the causes of fires played an important role in the development of fire prevention strategies and legislation.