Abstract
The ability of the fire service to save lives in building fires has a profound impact on planning. However, very little empirical data are available on how different factors affect this capability—or even how many that are rescued annually. The current paper aims to partly fill this gap with an assessment of all rescues performed by the fire departments in Sweden during 2017. A combination of incident reports and a large number of post-event interviews yielded a total of 51 rescues (to be compared to 88 fatalities) during that year, which show that the fire service has a great potential to reduce the number of fire fatalities. In these cases, the call to the dispatcher most frequently came from a neighbor (55%) or the victim (26%). The rescue was in 71% of the cases performed with interior attack with a breathing apparatus. The cases were also compared with fatal fires revealing that the odds of successful rescue increased, for example, if the fire occurred in an apartment building or if the response time was short. The joint data set of rescues and fatal fires was used to develop a methodology to calculate the probability of successful rescue depending on the capability of the fire service. This methodology provides the first fully empirical method for organizing the fire service in relation to saving lives in fires. A similar approach should be pursued for other accident types and consolidated for an evidence based assessment of the capability of the fire service.
Highlights
Performing rescue operations in building fires is often perceived as being a core activity of fire departments, and often has a fundamental impact on staffing and location of fire stations
There are some examples of empirical work in relation to fire department intervention to limit fire spread in buildings [6,7,8,9], but they generally take no or very simplified account of lives saved by the fire service
Comparing the numbers to the number of fire fatalities in residential fires on average 2009-2015, it can be concluded that the number of fire fatalities would have increased with 58% if the fire department would have arrived 30 min later to the scenes where individuals were rescued
Summary
Performing rescue operations in building fires is often perceived as being a core activity of fire departments, and often has a fundamental impact on staffing and location of fire stations. Location (and to a lesser degree staffing and resources) of the fire service has gained considerable attention from operational research from the sixties and onward and there are a vast numbers of optimization algorithms and mappings in the literature (see [3] for a review) These span from simple driving time optimization [4] to more complex models including, for example risk maps and different types of rescue units [5]. There are some examples of empirical work in relation to fire department intervention to limit fire spread in buildings [6,7,8,9], but they generally take no or very simplified account of lives saved by the fire service They are judged not to be useful to contrast the findings in the current paper
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