Key Health Data for the West Midlands 2002
CHAPTER SEVEN: FIRES ACROSS THE WEST MIDLANDS
List of Tables
List of Figures
Main Body
1: The Geography of the West Midlands
2: Life Expectancy and Inequalities
3: Drinking Water Quality
4: Chemical incidents in the West Midlands
5: Landfill Sites
6: IPPC
7: Fires in the West Midlands
8: Road Traffic Accidents
9: Drownings
10: Access to a healthy diet
11: National Health Service Priority Areas
12: Communicable Disease
13: Older People
7.1 Introduction
There were 56,700 accidental dwelling fires attended by fire brigades in the UK in 2000, resulting in 396 deaths and 12,000 injuries. It is estimated that the cost of dwelling fires to the economy of England and Wales in 1999 was estimated to be £1700 million. In response the Government has selected fire as a priority area setting the following objective:
"to reduce the number of accidental deaths and serious non-fatal casualties from dwelling fires in:
- children aged 0-14 years
- adults aged 65 years and older"
(The Accidental Injury Task Force 2002)
In these two population groups fires and flames cause 9% of accidental injury deaths in children and 3% in older people. There are also steep social class gradients. Residential fire deaths for children are 15 times higher for children in social class V compared to those in social class I. The priority headline interventions are:
- the installation of smoke alarms by fire brigades
- provide home fire risk assessments, safety checks and escape plans
- to targeting deprived groups, particularly children and older people in privately rented and temporary accommodation, and households in which people smoke.
This strategy has been linked to the pre-existing "Saving Lives: Our Healthier Nation" (Department of Health 1999) and "Safe as Houses. The Report of the Community Fire Safety Task Force" (1997). The latter recommends that the Home Office launch a five year strategy to reduce accidental deaths from fire in the home by 20% by March 2004 (the baseline being set on the average annual death rate from 1994 to 1998).
This chapter reports on the incidence and impact of fires across the West Midlands County, which is served by the West Midlands Fire Service (WMFS). It is one of five fire services across the West Midlands region, the others being Hereford and Worcester, Warwickshire, Shropshire, and Staffordshire. The West Midlands Fire Service covers the largest population of the five, over 2 million people and 1 million dwellings. The figures and tables reported here are generated from their incident reporting mechanisms that they kindly provided to the authors.
7.2. Types of fire
The attending fire crew make an informed opinion as to whether the fire is either accidental or arson, and the type of property affected. Table 7.1 reports the temporal trends in the types of fires tackled. Whilst there has been a decline in the number of accidental fires, there has been a consistent rise in the number of arson fires across the five years (see Table 7.1). The greatest increase has been in vehicle fires.
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Table 7.1. Fires by type, and probable cause for the years 1998/9 to 2001/2 as attended by the West Midlands Fire Service. |
7.3. Demography of victims of fire
As mentioned above age is a major factor in the population affected by fire. Figure 7.1 reports on those affected by fire being either rescued, injured or dying in a fire, across the West Midlands metropolitan county. Age-sex specific rates are used to account for differences in the magnitude of the population. These data show that males aged over 85 years have a rate consistently twice that of the rest of the population, with those under 5 being the next most at risk group. These findings are in keeping with the target groups identified by the Government (The Accidental Injury Task Force 2002).
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7.4. Injuries and deaths
The fire brigade record details of those affected by fire in terms of their injuries in three categories: rescued, injured or dead. Within the first two categories there is additional information on any injuries that occurred. These data are presented in Figure 7.2. Most (47.1%) are uninjured or who require only a precautionary check up. The most common injuries are being "overcome by smoke" (24.3%) and "burns and scalds" (17.1%). 108 (2.8%) people died in fires.
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Taking the count of those who would be likely to require some form of medical intervention, that is excluding those rescued with no injury, age sex standardized rates have been calculated for PCTs based on the location of the fire, rather than the place of residency of the casualty (see Table 7.2). The highest average annual rate is in Heart of Birmingham (5.12 per 10,000) which is three times higher than in Dudley South (1.58 per 10,000).
7.5. Location of fires
Using the geographical reference allocated by the Fire Service it is possible to map the location of the fires by ward and PCT. Presented here are the variations in fires per 1000 dwellings, as measured by the 1991 Census, the most complete data set available to the study, for accidental (Figure 7.3), arson (Figure 7.4) and all dwelling fires (Figure 7.5). Table 7.3 presents the rates of dwelling fires by PCT for the year 2001/2. Wolverhampton has the highest incidence of accidental and arson fires (60.6 and 23.8 fires per 1,000 dwellings), their accidental rate being 5 times higher and arson rate 10 times higher than North Birmingham.
The area covered by Figures 7.3, 7.4, and 7.5 relate to the areas labelled 1 to 6, and 23 in Figure 1.2 in Chapter 1 of this report.
References
The Accidental Injury Task Force). Preventing Accidental Injury - Priorities for Action Report to the Chief Medical Officer. London: Department of Health, 2002 (at http://www.doh.gov.uk/accidents/pdfs/preventinginjury.pdf)
Secretary of State for Health, Saving Lives: Our Healthier Nation. The Stationary Office London, 1999.
For more information please contact Sarafina
Cotterill on 0121 414 3368
© Department of Public Health and Epidemiology, University
of Birmingham