Analyzing the factors causing residential fires in Ohio Evidence using panel data from 2013-2017

Keywords: Residential fires, Urban fires, NFIRS, Panel regression
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 70

Abstract

Fire is considered as one of the top-most threats to urban safety in the United States. In 2018, the U.S. experienced one residential fire in every 87 seconds and most of them were residential. Despite being recognized as a serious hazard, it is not abating: between 2009 and 2018, fire losses and deaths increased by 90.6 percent and 20.5 percent, respectively. Residential fires are not totally unprecedented; rather, they are influenced by demographic, socioeconomic, and built-environmental variables. The exploratory analysis found the residential fire rate in the Midwest is considerably different from other regions. Between 2013 and 2017, Ohio has the highest fire density in the Midwest. The National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) was utilized to construct a panel dataset for 2952 census tracts in Ohio over a five-year period. The census tracts were classified into urban and rural in order to understand the residential fires that occurred in these two distinct spatial settings. Fixed effects outperformed random effects, and difference-in-differences confirmed the findings of the fixed effects. For urban census tracts, the percentage of vacant housing and population density were found to be significant predictors, whereas employment density was shown as a significant factor for rural census tracts. Despite having heteroscedasticity (p-value 0.05 for the Breusch-Pagan test), this research demonstrates that the variables causing urban and rural fires are different and therefore are driven by distinctive processes.