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Investigating the association between weather conditions, calendar events and socio-economic patterns with trends in fire incidence: an Australian case study

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Abstract

Fires in urban areas can cause significant economic, physical and psychological damage. Despite this, there has been a comparative lack of research into the spatial and temporal analysis of fire incidence in urban contexts. In this paper, we redress this gap through an exploration of the association of fire incidence to weather, calendar events and socio-economic characteristics in South-East Queensland, Australia using innovative technique termed the quad plot. Analysing trends in five fire incident types, including malicious false alarms (hoax calls), residential buildings, secondary (outdoor), vehicle and suspicious fires, results suggest that risk associated with all is greatly increased during school holidays and during long weekends. For all fire types the lowest risk of incidence was found to occur between one and six a.m. It was also found that there was a higher fire incidence in socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods and there was some evidence to suggest that there may be a compounding impact of high temperatures in such areas. We suggest that these findings may be used to guide the operations of fire services through spatial and temporal targeting to better utilise finite resources, help mitigate risk and reduce casualties.

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Notes

  1. This is acknowledged by one of the most prominent critics of p-values (Wolpert 2004).

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Acknowledgments

This paper is based on research conducted on a project funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage program grant LP0883861 with additional support from the industry partner, Queensland Fire and Rescue Service (QFRS). We would like to thank the QFRS for access to the data on which the paper is based. In particular we would like to thank Judy Newton of QFRS for her help and ad-vice on various aspects of the data sets. However, the interpretations of the analysis are solely those of the authors’ and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of QFRS or any of their employees. Finally, we thank referees for their comments that have helped to greatly improve the paper.

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Correspondence to Jonathan Corcoran.

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Corcoran, J., Higgs, G., Rohde, D. et al. Investigating the association between weather conditions, calendar events and socio-economic patterns with trends in fire incidence: an Australian case study. J Geogr Syst 13, 193–226 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10109-009-0102-z

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