How America cut deadly city fires in half

My family lives in a heavily-trafficked part of Brooklyn, and most nights you’ll hear the occasional whine of fire engine sirens through our living room window. But the torrent of sirens early on the morning of September 17 was enough to briefly rouse me from bed.

I found out later that day that a five-alarm fire involving more than 200 firefighters had ripped through a 150-year-old artists’ warehouse in the neighboring area of Red Hook. It was one of the biggest New York has experienced this year, and though no one was killed, the work of more than 500 artists may have been destroyed.

The Red Hook fire was a tragedy for New York’s already struggling artistic community, but it got me thinking about the state of urban fires in the US today. As long as cities have existed, fires have been a threat. Rome famously burned to the ground in 64 CE — though not, as was long assumed, at the hands of the Emperor Nero — while the diarist Samuel Pepys described how “even the very stones of churches” burned in London’s Great Fire of 1666.

Here in the US, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 consumed 3.3 square miles of the city, and left 100,000 people homeless. As late as the 1970s, the Bronx in New York was for a time averaging as many as two fires per hour, part of an endless conflagration that ultimately destroyed 80 percent of the borough’s housing over the course of the decade.

As the Red Hook disaster shows, fire is still a threat, especially to older buildings. But beneath the sound of those sirens is a story of underappreciated progress toward ever greater safety. Compared with 1980, the per-capita civilian fire death rate has fallen by roughly two-thirds — from about 28.6 deaths per million people to around 11 per million in 2023. Total reported fires are also down by half over that time period, and injuries have fallen by more than half.

As the terrible Los Angeles fires at the start of the year demonstrated, the growing risk to urban areas from wildfires presents a new and dangerous threat to US cities. But even with those rare but spectacular disasters, America’s homes and buildings are far less vulnerable to deadly fires than they once were. And we’ve gotten here through the accumulation of small improvements.

Smoke alarms that work: There may be no single more important fire safety feature than the humble smoke alarm. While the very first automatic smoke fire alarm was invented in 1890, as late as 1977, less than a quarter of all households in the US had smoke alarms, which is one of those facts of the recent past that leaves me gobsmacked.

Today alarms are now present in the vast majority of US homes — and when they’re working, the death rate per reported home fire is about 60 percent lower than in homes without a working alarm. Modern building codes also now usually require interconnected systems and alarms in bedrooms. But they have to be checked consistently to make sure they actually work — a large share of fatal fires still occur in homes with no alarm or one that failed to operate. And battery-powered smoke alarms are safer than those that are hardwired.

Automatic sprinklers: If a fire does break out, more buildings have automatic sprinklers to quench them. Sprinklers can make a huge difference: the per-fire civilian death rate is roughly 90 percent lower when sprinklers are present than when no automatic extinguishing system is installed. Most new multifamily houses and apartment buildings are required to have them by code, and they’ve become more common in other new construction.

Safer furnishings and interior finishes. After years of debate, the US adopted a national smolder-resistance standard for upholstered furniture in 2021, which federalized an existing California code. Upholstery that’s less prone to ignite from a dropped cigarette or similar ember means fewer small room fires becoming structure conflagrations.

Less smoking — and “fire-safe” cigarettes. Cigarettes, man — they can kill you in so many ways, including by accidentally igniting a house fire. In 1980 there were an estimated 70,800 smoking-related cigarette home fires leading to 1,820 deaths. But cigarette smoking in the US has fallen significantly, meaning fewer cigarettes to trigger fires, and all states now require so-called “fire-safe” cigarettes that are less likely to ignite. By 2016, the number of smoking-related fires had fallen to 16,500, causing 660 deaths, even as both population and the number of buildings had increased.

Better electrical and heating safety. Modern building codes now require safeguards like arc-fault circuit interrupters (AFCIs) that cut power when wires start arcing behind walls, which can risk sparking sudden fires. While heating equipment is still a major cause of fires, heating–related fires fell by a third between 2010 and 2019, thanks in part to appliance improvements like automatic space heater shutoffs and temperature controls.

These fire safety improvements didn’t just happen. Each required regulators, often learning from fire disasters of the past, to institute new building codes and new product safety requirements. Public service campaigns pushed people to get smoke alarms for their homes and warned them of risky behaviors like smoking in bed. These are the engines of progress that get overlooked, but have directly saved countless lives over the course of decades.

We can never know when a fire is prevented. But maybe my life was saved — and maybe yours as well.

The progress has been uneven. Most US fire deaths still happen where we sleep: homes account for the clear majority of civilian fire fatalities. The risks concentrate among older adults, people with disabilities, and lower-income households living in older buildings, where missing alarms, space-heater misuse, or unsafe extension cords are more common. And we can expect the risk of wildfires, including those that directly threaten cities, will only grow in the future.

But we shouldn’t miss how far we’ve come from the days when the Bronx — and neighborhoods throughout the country — was burning.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!