Fires damage buildings and claim lives every year, but many are preventable. The District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department inspects buildings and educates residents on fire safety, but it cannot reach every property and community each year. We are partnering with Fire and EMS and the Office of the Chief Technology Officer to predict fire risk for buildings in DC.
DCFD employee installs a smoke detector during August 2023's All Hands on Fire Prevention Outreach
Credit: https://twitter.com/dcfireems/status/1692272830455361584
Why is this issue important in DC?
Between 2016 and 2022, there were 189,801 calls related to fire incidents in DC, including 15,770 “highest priority” calls 1. Fires in multi-unit buildings and highly-populated neighborhoods can displace dozens of households and businesses at a time. Fire and EMS already uses an evidence-based outreach strategy to install free smoke alarms in neighborhoods2. However, the Department has limited resources and cannot inspect all buildings in DC so it must prioritize which to inspect first. Using predictive modeling may give fire inspectors another tool to prioritize inspections and prevent more building fires.
What are we doing?
We are working with publicly available data via Open Data DC and internal data on fire incidents in residential and commercial buildings. We will use this data to train statistical models which will rank individual buildings according to their risk of fire in the future. We will develop two separate models, one for commercial buildings and another for residential blocks. We are also working with the intended users of these models (personnel from the Department’s Fire Prevention Division) to develop a dashboard that will allow them to use the data and risk predictions from our models in their workflow.
What have we learned?
We expect to have findings about how well building characteristics predict fire risk in 2024.
What comes next?
If the models predict fire risk well enough, Fire and EMS plan to integrate the risk scores into their inspection scheduling process.
What is happening behind the scenes?
Lab staff sat down with fire inspectors to understand how they schedule inspections and how to best incorporate fire risk score into their current system. Team members also joined a Department outreach event to install smoke alarms – and they came to one of our homes! On one day, the outreach team visited 416 houses and 78 apartments and installed 20 smoke alarms.
““The mission of the Fire and EMS Department is to save lives. By using state of the art technology to understand where incidents occur and the populations that are most impacted, we can tailor our prevention efforts to target those most in need.” ”