27. Death by Fire? Probably Not

Fire deaths in the U. S. have fallen 90 percent over the past 100 years, a great and greatly underappreciated gain. How did it happen -- and could we ever get to zero?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:43Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:28Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  So imagine it's a Thursday night and you've just got off from work and you're meeting some friends at a club, one of your favorite bands is playing. And you get there, you get a beer, your friends are in a good mood, one of them just got a promotion, the opening act isn't bad. Then the headliner comes on and as they bang out the first few chords, you see this shower of sparks up near the stage. At first you think, hey, cool, good old fashioned rock and roll pyrotechnic show. But something goes wrong and the sparks catch the wall on fire. And next thing you know, flames are shooting out from the stage right toward you.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  And now flames rolling the ceiling over the dance floor and the hot gases and the smoke, the toxic smoke, start coming down from the ceiling, which is about 12 feet tall or so, and was down to within 18 inches of the floor in less than 90 seconds after ignition. So you can imagine just people trying to get out of there. In this particular case, a lot of bodies ended up, people were pushing and trying to get out and they ended up stacked on each other in the doorway. There were other collections of bodies throughout the nightclub that were found dead. Really, really a tragedy. So about 25% of the people that were in the nightclub that night died and about 50% of the people that were in the nightclub that night were seriously injured, many of

• 3:39Speaker 01

  them having to get multiple surgeries, you know, ears burned off, hands burned off or damaged, just horrible, horrible injuries. All they wanted to do was go out and relax and have a night of fun and things drastically turned in 90 seconds.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Today, underappreciated improvements in fire safety and how a century-old fire is keeping you safe right now. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 4:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  You probably remember the story of that nightclub fire. It was February 23rd, 2003. The club was called The Station. It's in West Warwick, Rhode Island, in Old Milltown. 100 people were killed, another 230 were injured. It was one of the deadliest fires in American history. It's also the kind of thing that just doesn't happen much anymore. Over the past 100 years, the US death rate from accidental fires has dropped roughly 90%. About 100 years ago, some 9,000 people died in fires every year, a rate of about 9 per 100,000 people.

• 5:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today, there are about 3,000 fire deaths a year, a rate of about 1 per 100,000 people. That is a remarkable improvement, one of the most underappreciated improvements I can think of. Dan Madrykowski is the latest in the long, long line of people to whom we owe our thanks. He's a fire protection engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST. The day after the fire at The Station nightclub, Madrykowski arrived on the scene. It was raining.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  You know, there were still cars in the parking lot from victims. Family members and friends of victims were coming by to leave flowers and teddy bears and, you know, collect the vehicles. And needless to say, with the rain and whatnot, it was quite the setting for, deservedly so, a lot of sadness and grieving. We collected the information we could. We made measurements the best we could so that we could develop a simulation and a recreation of this fire, so we could get a better understanding.

• 6:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  The understanding they reached was pretty simple. The pyrotechnics ignited some polyurethane foam insulation. Soundproofing, Madrykowski says, that the club put up in response to neighbors' complaints about noise. The exits were hard to get to. There weren't any sprinklers. Nobody at the club had a fire plan. After the station fire, Rhode Island changed its codes. Simple things like posting exit signs near the floor, so if you're crawling through smoke, you can find your way out. They ditched a grandfather clause that exempted old buildings from modern safety requirements like sprinklers. Things catch on fire sometimes. That's probably not going to change anytime soon.

• 6:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  But people dying in the flames? To a modern scientist like Madrykowski, even 3,000 deaths a year is unacceptable.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  That's still too many. I mean, that's a terrible way to go, and the cost of fire continues to go up.

• 7:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Something as bad as the station fire with its big fatality count, it's bound to grab the headlines. But do you know the median number of deaths in a fatal fire in America? It's one. More than half of all fatal fires in the US have exactly one fatality. And 85% of fatal fires happen not in a nightclub, or an office building, or a school, but at home. And that's where Dan Madrykowski is trying to help.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Sort of the ultimate thing right now for residential occupancies are residential sprinklers. The big difference between a smoke alarm system and a sprinkler system is the sprinkler system controls the hazard. It starts to shut the fire down. It reduces the amount of toxic gas that's being produced. It reduces the amount of heat that's being produced, and it gives the firefighters a better environment to work in when they get there to save your home, or to save anyone that is still trapped in an apartment building, in an adjacent apartment, or things like that.

• 8:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, Dan, if you were in charge of the world, or at least this country, for a little while, would you want every home in America to have to have a sprinkler system?

• 8:24Speaker 01

  That would certainly be the direction and there are many counties and states that are moving in that direction. At the same time, even though the national model codes have called for sprinklers in the home, local authorities can say, "We're not going to adopt that part of the model." So just recently in Pennsylvania, just the other day, they voted to not accept the residential construction code as it is with the sprinkler requirement in it. They're going to defer implementing the sprinkler requirement in all new homes in that state. On the other hand, California just adopted the regulation and every new home in California will have sprinklers in it, automatic fire sprinklers. The trend is coming, it's coming.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  You know, one of your challenges is fire is also a bit of a socio-economic problem. If you're poor, if you're very young, under five, or if you're elderly, over 65, you have a higher chance of dying in fire than the rest of the population in the United States.

• 9:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dan, I know that smoking is a leading cause of fatal fire. Have a few too many drinks, kind of lose track of where the cigarette is. That kind of makes sense, a cigarette is a pretty good little torch. Do you have any good solutions for that?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  So NIST has been conducting research for the past 20 years, looking at cigarette ignition, looking at ways to improve the safety or the fire resistance of furnishings. Because typically, it's a cigarette, somebody's smoking in bed, the cigarette falls on the bedding and then gets the mattress involved in the fire. Or the cigarette falls in the sofa and starts the sofa on fire. So NIST has been looking at this at multiple fronts. One is trying to improve the furnishings, and then two, how do we make a safer cigarette? In the past, cigarettes, if you start to smoke it and you leave it in the ashtray and you forget about it, it's going to basically burn itself up completely. And this is also a high cost to the consumer that are smoking.

• 10:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wait a minute, wait a minute, you're telling me you're concerned about the poor people who buy cigarettes and don't get to smoke the whole thing?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  I'm just saying that's a side benefit.

• 10:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're a good guy, Dan. You're a good guy. You care about everybody.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  We're trying to make as many win-win situations as we can here. But the bottom line is now with the less fire-prone cigarette, when you light it, it should self-extinguish. And so that means it won't be smoldering in the bedding, it won't be smoldering in the sofa, and there's less chance for it to start a fire. It's not a completely fire-safe cigarette, but certainly it's a great improvement. All 50 states have now voted to require only those types of cigarettes to be sold in their state. And according to NFPA, the National Fire Protection Association, there's been a decrease already in smoking fires, smoking-related fires. So as this is starting to spread across the states, we're hoping that that part of the fire problem can almost be eliminated.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  And so that would be a big chunk if we can get rid of those fatalities. That's almost a third of the number of fatalities that occur in people's homes. So that's a big start. The next big number, so to speak, would be the cooking equipment. About 17% of civilian fatalities happen as a result of cooking equipment fires, or fires involving cooking equipment. But the reality is typically it's unattended cooking. So, you know, when you have these fires, again, the people don't appreciate the magnitude, how it can go from sort of nothing to a full fire involvement, flashing over a room where we have flames, floor to ceiling, and smoke, just toxic smoke, pushing throughout the entire structure. What can be done to examine cooking equipment and perhaps make it so it will shut itself off?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  So that if no one's around the stove for 20 minutes, maybe due to a motion sensor, it just stops cooking? Or that it has maybe a temperature regulator on it? So if the pan starts to get too hot, close to the auto-ignition temperature, where basically oil or food in the pan would just burst into flames, it'll prevent it from getting to its auto-ignition temperature. So working with a group, NIST is working with a group of fire professionals to try to see what can be done about this cooking problem? Because that's sort of the next big number that we want to try to attack and bring down.

• 12:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up, one of the worst fires in history, and how, eventually, it saved a lot of lives.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  Forty people going down the steps. We all tumbled one right after another. And I saw people throwing themselves from the window. And as soon as we went down, we couldn't get out because the bodies were coming down. It was terrible.

• 13:23Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 14:08Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 14:42Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 15:16Speaker 02

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio.

• 15:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Exactly 100 years ago, in March of 1911, there was a fire in the Ash Building, that's A-S-C-H, in Manhattan. The building housed a garment factory for a company called Triangle Shirtwaist. The fire started on the eighth floor, probably when someone tossed a match or a cigarette into a pile of clothing scraps. A lot of things went wrong from there. The seamstresses on the ninth floor weren't promptly told about the fire, the exit door was locked, the fire escapes collapsed, and 146 people were killed, most of them young women. The irony was that the Ash Building was one of the new breed of fireproof buildings that were going up all over New York.

• 16:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's an appealing word, "fireproof," but in this case, all it meant was that the building itself wouldn't easily catch on fire. It was made of steel and masonry. Everything inside the building, though, the wooden floors, the piles of fabric, the seamstresses, they could burn. And they did.

• 16:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Pauline Pepe was one of the survivors.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  I saw the fire in the tables where they were all filled with lingerie material, you know, and that come up in a flame. When I saw that, I ran out. I went to the door we go out with, but the fire was there. So I went to the door that was closed. I didn't know that was closed. I went there and I found the door closed. I just stood there till they opened it. Forty people going down the steps. We all tumbling one right after another. And I saw people throwing themselves from the window. And as soon as we went down, we couldn't get out because the bodies were coming down. It was terrible.

• 17:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Turn in the century, America, and the cities in particular, were regularly punctuated by catastrophic fires. Entire apartment blocks, neighborhoods, even whole cities burned to the ground. So what happened? How'd that stop?

• 17:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  I asked Robert Solomon. He manages the Building Fire Protection and Life Safety Department at the National Fire Protection Association. It's a group that ties together architects and insurance companies and fire departments to study fire and write national standards and safety codes.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  That really was kind of a pivotal fire in U.S. history, whereas prior to that, even though we had fires with many, many fatalities, we had a school fire in 1908, for example, that killed 172 children in a suburb just outside of Cleveland, Ohio. But the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was kind of that watershed moment when everybody said, "Enough." You know, when you look at the building regulations at that time, many of them were really directed at preserving the building itself, the structure, and the contents. But the people, you know, kind of not given a very high priority. So Triangle Shirtwaist clearly was the watershed moment that got everybody's attention, said, you know,

• 18:47Speaker 04

  What can we do? What should we be doing for this concept that we now refer to as life safety? What features? What actions can we take to help protect the occupants?

• 18:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Before that, the aim had been much more about protecting property, right? And it's what you're saying. And now the aim has shifted to a large degree to protecting lives, yes?

• 19:07Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. Like I said, even though we had these horrible fires, there just seemed to be... The right circumstances just weren't there to do something about it.

• 19:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So 146 people died at the Triangle Fire 100 years ago. One fire in one day in New York City. In 2009, in all of New York City, for the whole year, 73 people died. So literally, one-half the number in the entire city for the entire year died is in the Triangle Fire. How did we get there?

• 19:41Speaker 04

  Well, we got there by starting to broaden the scope of these different codes and rules and provisions that had been out there. To say, OK, you know how to do this. Can you do it for this notion of occupant protection? So over the years, we just see NFPA telling me how many exits I need from each floor. How wide do the exit doors have to be? How wide do the exit stairs have to be? How do I protect the exit stairs? When do we start to specify early warning systems, like building fire alarm systems? We're now able to automatically notify the fire department. We're going to put sprinkler systems in.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  So just as technology moved forward and the studies on these horrible fires kind of became a little bit more formal, it gave NFPA and some of these new NFPA committees the chance to come up with some rules and provisions to preclude that type of event in the future.

• 20:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  When I was a kid, we lived in an old wooden farmhouse in the countryside, in the back of beyond, really. Now, I was pretty scared as a kid, scared that something bad would happen to my parents, scared that my future Major League Baseball career would be ended by premature injury. But the scariest thing in the world was if I was at school or in town and I heard the alarm go off at the fire station. Every time, I was sure it was my house on fire. And I'd jump on my bike and pedal home as fast as I could. It was uphill all the way, 1.6 miles, and I'd collapse when I got home. My house never burned down, but it could have.

• 21:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  The chimney was still scarred from a fire from when the previous owners lived there. I have kids now about the same age I was back at the height of my fear. And you know what? They don't think about our house burning down at all, like, never. I talked to Dan Madrykowski, the fire scientist, about this. He said that lack of fear is not necessarily a good thing.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  People don't consider fires as a threat. If you were to tell people, you know, would you like to have a fire protection system in your home or a burglar alarm system in your home? I think most people would probably vote for the burglar alarm. They're concerned about crime, perhaps. But people have candles in their home. People really don't appreciate, they don't have a feel for, I have this little flame or this small candle, for example, and if that were to get, you know, tipped over or the container would break and flame would spread to my sofa or to my bed or something, they really don't appreciate just how rapidly the hazard from that fire can build up and threaten their family and their home. I mean, seconds.

• 22:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, I gotta, I wouldn't tell anybody else this, but I was a pretty bad pyro as a kid. Were you?

• 22:49Speaker 01

  A little, but you know, again, this is one of these things where the government has found a good way to put my talents to good use for society.

• 22:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, they got me doing radio. That's not really a good fit.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Freakonomics Radio is a co-production of WNYC, APM, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Shia Levitt and mixed by David Herman. Our staff includes Susie Lechtemberg, Chris Neary, and Colin Campbell. Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes and you'll get the next episode in your sleep. You can find more audio at FreakonomicsRadio.com. And as always, if you want to read more about the hidden side of everything, go to Freakonomics.com.

• 23:53Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 24:26Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 24:57Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 25:34Speaker 05

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