Epidemic (n): 1. an outbreak of a disease that spreads more quickly and more extensively among a group of people than would normally be expected; 2. a rapid and extensive development or growth, usually of something unpleasant (En Carta Dictionary)

Nearly 4,000 people die from it every year; it will be the cause of more than 16,000 injuries this year; in 2006 its financial impact in the USA was $11.3 billion in losses, $6.9 billion in residential property alone.  IT is fire.

Someone will die in a fire in the United State within the next 2 ½ hours of you reading this sentence.  Before the next half hour passes, another person will be injured in a fire in the USA.  We in the United States have the worst fire death and injury statistics in the industrialized world.  And it’s been that way for a long time.

If we were talking about some health disorder or disease we would be outraged about such numbers.  We would demand that the government do something about this epidemic, an epidemic that hits the young, the old, and the poor harder than anyone else. We would demand that studies be conducted and research done to identify a cure, or better yet, a prevention for the disease.   The media would be all over the story every day.

The problem with this epidemic is that it has been studied and we know what causes it: people.  The primary cause for the vast majority of fires in the USA is human behavior.  We do stupid things with fire.  Every minute someone is smoking in bed, improperly disposing of fireplace ashes, leaving matches where children can get them, leaving food cooking on the stove to watch TV, not storing flammable liquids properly, keeping combustible materials too close to a heat source…the list goes on and on.

I started this website because I’ve seen the consequences of that human behavior up close and personal.  Too many times I’ve helped people sift through the charred remains of the home trying to salvage any little pieces of their lives that they can.  That’s the part of the epidemic that the statistics can’t describe: how fire changes your life.  Families dealing with the death of a loved one; a horribly burned child who miraculously survives, but faces years of corrective and plastic surgery; a young family that loses everything when their apartment burns because they didn’t know that renter’s insurance would have covered it all for about $125 a year.

I’ve got to go now because you’re probably tired of reading and I know I’m tired of typing.  I’ll see you back here tomorrow—or the next day—as we continue this conversation about how we can stop this epidemic.  The fire epidemic.