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Abstract:
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Each year more than 2,500 Americans lose their lives to home fires. The 360,000+ home fires that occur each year seriously injure more than 13,000 people and cause over $7 billion in property damage. Approximately 23 percent of U.S. households have no or non-working smoke alarms; these same households account for 60 percent of home fire related deaths. Many of these tragedies are easily preventable. Simply having a working smoke alarm increases survivability in a home fire by up to 50 percent.
In 2014 the American Red Cross commenced its effort to prevent home fires, fire deaths, and injuries across the country through targeted interventions in at-risk areas. To date, the Red Cross has installed nearly 2 million free smoke alarms and visited more than 800,000 households across all 50 states, the District of Columbia and five U.S. Territories. In 2015 the DC chapter of DataKind, a non-profit, volunteer led organization, began a project to help the Red Cross and its partners identify and map specific communities that are most at-risk. In this talk, I will discuss our progress in this effort and our use of fire response data, smoke alarm data, and census data.
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