The Cost of Fire
Take a look at the article about hidden war costs on CNN’s Web site. Based on a report from the House Joint Economic Committee, “the total economic impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is estimated at $1.6 trillion by 2009.” This article also says that “the committee calculated the average cost of both wars for a family of four would be $20,900 from 2002 to 2008.”
The committee’s report estimates that the cost of war is “nearly double the $804 billion in direct war costs the White House requested so far from Congress…. [T]he higher total economic impact comes from, among other things, the cost of borrowing money to pay for the war, lost productivity, higher oil prices and the cost of health care for veterans.”
Let‘s do a similar calculation to find out how much money an average family of four pays for the total cost of fire in the United States during same six-year span that the congressional report covered.
The NFPA‘s The Total Cost of Fire in United States report indicates that for 2004, “the total cost was estimated at $231–278 billion, or roughly 2 to 2-1/2% of U.S. gross domestic product.” Based on the statistics available from the U.S. Census Bureau, the total estimated population of the United States in 2004 was 293,655,404.
Now divide the total cost of fire by the total population to calculate the total cost of fire per capita in the United States in 2004:
$278 billion/293,655,404 = $946.69
That is $946.69 for every single American. Now multiply that by four to calculate the total cost of fire in the United States for a family of four in 2004:
$946.69 X 4 = $3,786.75
That is the total cost of fire in 2004 for a family of four. Now multiply that by six to get the total cost for the six-year span:
$3,786.75 X 6 = $22,720.56
Notice that the estimated total cost of fire of $22,720 is more than the $20,900 that the calculated cost of war that the congressional committee reported.
The calculation in the congressional report has many additional factors that have inflated the actual cost of war thus far. Obviously our simple mathematics don’t cover the inflationary impact of those parameters, yet still the total cost of fire was higher than their predictions for the war.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has said that the actual cost of war is about $12 billion a month. Divide $278 billion a year by 12 months and you get $23.16 billion a month for fire. That is twice the cost of war.
As of Wednesday morning, the total number of American casualties in Iraq was 3,863 in four-and-a-half years. This number is similar to the number of fire fatalities the United States has every year, which add up to about four times as the fatalities of the war.
If only people knew about our fire statistics. I only wish our politicians could put things in perspective and compare our total cost of fire to their total cost of war. It is up to us to provide them with that information.
November 15th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
This is well on point. If that is the direct costs of fire can we only imagine what the inderct costs are? If there are over 33,000 fire departments in the US, what is the cost of fire per department? Better yet, what is the cost per fire fighter. We all (Fire Chief’s, Fire Marshal’s and Fire Fighters need to know these numbers and spread the knowledge!
Remember fire sprinklers save fire fighters too!
November 18th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
I applaud your novel approach to looking at the costs of fire. Over the years, efforts to publicize the total cost of fire in the U.S. and encourage its use as a basis for conducting more rigorous economic analysis of fire protection alternatives has been inconsistent at best.
An awareness of these costs is indeed a necessary starting point. But discomfort at the realization of how the costs of fire compare to the costs of war does not easily translate into action on either front.
The public’s willingness to pay for war seems to have eroded significantly in recent months. That has stimulated political discussion, but as yet very limited action to reduce these costs (As this week’s news from Congress clearly indicates).
Most proposals to reduce the long-run costs of fire have the perverse consequence of increasing costs in the near term, often with exceedingly small marginal gains for the economy and society as a whole. In contrast, stopping losses and reducing the costs of war seems in the minds of many to offer at least some short term hope of restoring American moral and political credibility at home and abroad.
Any effort to motivate people to act based on their economic interests requires careful consideration of how they value losses and deal with uncertainties. People view the long-term costs of continuing war unacceptable, but do not see a similar long-term loss prospect confronting them in terms of fire risk despite the remote albeit real possibility that fire will affect them more personally and directly than the war. This may not make much sense, but this one observation says a lot about our challenge.
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