The Detroit phenomenon known as Devil's Night was only weeks away, and familiar newsroom rumblings of City Hall's dubious fire count accuracy began anew. Each year, the day before Halloween becomes the prime focus of pyromaniacs intent on destroying the scant homes that remain in Detroit's more impoverished neighborhoods. Similarly, each year, the Detroit Free Press puts a team of reporters on the streets to assess the latest fire damage and patiently awaits the release of the fire department's official fire count.
Enter the National Fire Information Reporting System (NFIRS), a little-known database that nearly every state keeps in nearly identical form. I first learned of the NFIRS tapes while working with the Belleville (III.) News-Democrat in 1992. Every fire company, no matter if paid or volunteer, is required to fill out the reports that make up the database and send them to the marshal. For a mere $20, I received five years worth of nine-track tapes for the southwestern Illinois region.
In East St. Louis, I was able to determine there was a higher propensity for fires and a greater ratio for burning houses owned by the land barons than in the rest of East St. Louis. For the Devil's Night analysis, I obtained five years of data for the Detroit metropolitan regions from the Michigan fire marshal. Summarily, the database contains: time, date, address, time call received, time dispatched, time arrived, type of fire, cause, and damage assessment.
It's a CAR reporter's dream, but can be a nightmare because entries are entered by hand and keypunch accuracy varies. Last year, we analyzed the effectiveness of the Detroit Fire Department's two-year-old smoke detector giveaway program. By isolating actual house fires and combining fields for smoke detector presence and functionality, we were able to tell which areas had a greater number of detectorless fires and greatest need.
We learned that 'exposure fires'—where a fire spreads from one building to another—were often reported as a single incident by the department, leading to an undercount of actual homes destroyed. Using Atlas GIS mapping software, we found the Devil's Night 'hot spots.' The NFIRS system is becoming more universal, although some departments still fail to file reports. If you run into a problem, call the data analyst for the state fire marshal.