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Largely curtailed by people quitting smoking. Smoking in bed causing house fires was a big plot point in old movies.
It's as if maybe a lot of people quit smoking the last few decades...
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actually looks like declines kind of rapidly slowed about 30 years ago. looks like an area ready for technological disruption.
Luckily we targeted the root causes (building stuff out of flammable materials)
No it's just not people quitting smoking. It's also smoke detectors, safer electrical and fewer people cooking at home.
Fire suppression in the range hood much like what is required in food service. Smoking still a big killer.
It’s funny talking to friends who are firemen in suburbs versus South Texas… completely different job description it sounds like.
In general, we actually have TOO MANY firefighters. Just maybe not in California.
Mostly attributed to less flammable cigarettes and arcfault circuit breakers.
I think once asked an insurance executive what the biggest change that happened in the course of his career he said "undoubtedly the invention of the oven chip". (Fries to Americans).
Wonder how much of a victory NFPA claims for mandated home sprinklers. Or just fewer open flames and smarter homeowners?
Arc-fault circuits are partially responsible, at least since the 1990s.
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No joke: can't rule out arson for some of those in bad economy.
Is this a graph of smoking rates? Material science, Building codes, or something else?
This is why there are still tons of fire departments and massive fire trucks that fly through town and respond to mundane medical events such as chest pain or fainting. Why? These are not ambulances, yet these hulking behemoths fly through town as though they’re responding to a
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If you also factor in that there are likely almost twice as many houses now as there were then, that’s an impressive drop.
I remain surprised how many times I see fire trucks making calls for car accidents or medical issues when a smaller truck would make far more sense.
a 2x reduction is nice, but the chart makes it look like a 10x reduction. i always set the y axis to 0
Less smoking, less flammable stuff, less gas, less doggy electric heaters, more smoke detectors...
Much better electrical wiring in houses and the panels themselves contributed
Smoking is a huge part of this, and better material science.
We've come a long way
We'd be safer in LA if we hadn't blocked scrape-offs of tinder boxes not built to last this long.
Individual homeowners have gotten smarter. States have gotten stupider.
There are still tonnes, the y axis misleadingly starts at about 40% of its max value.
FIrEs aRe DuE tO GlObAl WarMiNg 
Quote
Matthew Yglesias
@mattyglesias
There used to be tons of house fires
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apparently, the typical homeowner is a better fire-risk mitigator than CA Ds...
I was just saying you don’t hear about people falling asleep smoking in bed and starting fires these days. Also electric blankets and space heaters are both more rare and far safer, plus improved safety of appliances and electrical wiring in general.
Also gas is safer now, and many moving away from gas. Not much of a comfort to those in LA of course.
I think this provides the best explanation — more smoke alarms in homes leads to fewer fires.
That number is about half its height in the 80's. Consider how overworked those departments were, the current numbers are still pretty high!
As someone who joined the fire service in the 1980’s, I can validate this trend line has been true in our community. The number of house fires dropped off significantly over the last 40 years.
Newer construction homes just don’t burn as often as houses did before 2000.
This should be two charts: 1-Americans are setting fire to their houses less often. (Good!) 2-A new, consistent threat has emerged in wildfires, which are far more destructive, deadly and expensive mass disasters than what we had 30+ years ago. (Deaths from fire on
rise, too)
Hats off to Heartland Homes Remodeling & Roofing and ABC Supply Co. Inc. in Columbia, MO. By installing our shingles containing upcycled rubber and plastic along with 3M™ Smog-Reducing Granules on this home in Missouri, they're contributing to a cleaner and greener planet - one
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It looks like most of the improvement was pre-2000s. Not much improvement in the past 25 years.
Next time use a zero-based Y axis. The number of house fires is down by half - and there's more houses than there used to be - but there are still way too many lethal house fires
There’s still a thousand of them per day, going flat for 20 years. Not great.
1. Fire-resistant building materials.
2. Less smoking.
3. Safer electrical systems.
Fatalities from residential fires are way down too due to smoke alarms.
Might look less impressive if the y-axis started at 0. And the axis labels weren’t so faint as to be near illegible on a mobile phone.
This does not mean house fires or their causes necessarily decreased. Likely means preventive measures of escalation and mitigation options after small fires have improved.
Few other things to note that also contributed to house fires: we used to not have good building inspectors, so gas and electric issues went routinely unchecked. In 1995 we had a national building code passed standardizing minimums codes/best practices.
Correct, though note your y-axis is a little hyperbolic. Fires down 2X in 40 years (smoke detectors, better code etc).
I was thinking about this last night home insurance costs much more but fire rate lower. Does this graph include wild fires ?
I imagine safety regulations in building made a difference, as did better materials.
One of the leading causes of fires used to be cigarettes. I just wonder if the decrease in smoking follows a similar curve?
People stopped smoking 
Particularly they stopped smoking in bed and falling asleep with lit cigarettes.
Particularly they stopped smoking in bed and falling asleep with lit cigarettes.
Doesn't seem to include houses burned by wildfires. I wonder how that would affect the graph line in the past few years.
But climate change!!
How could anything like that be solved without addressing global warming!
How much of this is just the aluminum wiring that was briefly popular in the 1970s?
#1 childhood fear. I was constantly seeing imaginary flickering flames in my house.
We had a fire, our central fire alarm worked and the fire department was there in minutes. We weren’t even home
Yes. Lots of building code improvements. Safer heating systems, and smoking tobacco has diminished.
My recollection of 1980 is that it wasn’t this fire-y. Seems like I’d have noticed
IIRC, Canada saw a resurgence of house fires despite a drop in smoking rates. The people who were still smoking were buying contraband cigarettes from native reserves, which don’t have the self-extinguishing measures Big Tobacco built into legitimate smokes
GFI outlets, smoke detectors, building regulations…a lot has changed over the decades.
