Reading fire statistics with the aim of prevention: when analysing fire statistics, the number of accidental fires is obtained by removing arson from the total number of fires. It is an interesting approach in the sense that it counts only fires that could have been influenced by preventive actions targeting the dwelling, its installation and its occupants. This is in contrast to data where arson is included, which falls within the field of crime prevention and is much harder to reduce, if possible, at all.
While investigating the fire statistics through the angle of accidental domestic fires and the potential impact of preventive actions, FEEDS made a more in-depth analysis: first, fires with unknown origin are usually so characterised because no inspection was carried out (for example because doing so was not requested by the insurance company). Therefore, the distribution of causes for these uninspected fires can be assumed to be the same as that of the inspected fires. Second, the figure for arson was taken out to limit the scope to accidental fires only.