Storage Properties Excluding Dwelling Garages

Overview of the fire problem with storage properties, including trend tables, causes, time of day, day of week, month of year and area of origin.

Executive Summary

Storage properties include properties used for the storage of general items, agricultural products such as grain and livestock, vehicles, refrigerated products, and products requiring tank storage. Only fires reported to public fire departments are included in these statistics. Although properties coded separately as dwelling garages are normally considered part of thiscategory, they are discussed in the section “Home Fires” and are not included here.

A few property types were added to or subtracted from the storage property groupings in Version 5.0 of the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS). Bus, truck, fleet or auto dealer storage and heavy machine or equipment storage were both moved to vehicle parking area in the outside or special category. These two properties combined accounted for about 600 fires per  year during 1994-1998. Contractors shed fires (formerly about 200 per year) are now counted as storage fires rather than with the fires in vacant, idle or property under demolition or renovation. Document centers and record repositories and wood chip piles have moved into storage from basic industry. Together, these two properties averaged under 100 fires per year.

Almost 23,000 structure fires were reported in these properties per year. During the four-year period of 1999-2002, an estimated average of 22,600 structure fires were reported in storage properties excluding dwelling garages per year. These fires caused an annual average of 17 civilian deaths, 209 civilian injuries, and $506 million in direct property damage.