No Longer a Burning Issue

When the bell sounded, Fire Capt. Christopher Cooper broke off mid-sentence and bolted for the trucks. As he slid past a buddy in the doorway, he heard the words that raise every L.A. firefighter’s blood. “It’s a structure,” Cooper’s colleague said. “We’ve got a structure.”

He meant a structure fire, a burning building. For L.A. city firefighters, known for their urban firefighting skills, “structure” conjures up an intensely proud identity. But it’s a word Cooper hears less and less.

The reason is that fires, an age-old scourge, are in sharp decline. Although Southern Californians will be more conscious of fire dangers now that the annual brush fire season is here, in reality fires have declined in L.A., statewide, nationwide and throughout the industrialized world. Structure fires, brush fires and arsons have declined. So have fire deaths, and fire losses as measured as a percentage of the gross domestic product.

Per capita, there are now half as many fires nationally than there were in the 1970s. Declining fastest of all are the roaring structure fires for which L.A. firefighters are known: Their number has fallen by nearly two-thirds per capita citywide in two decades.

Despite a one-third increase in the city’s population, the number of structure fires has declined from 8,557 in 1979 to 3,406 in 1997. The number of total fires nationally has decreased from nearly 3 million in 1980 to just under 2 million in 1996, according to the National Fire Protection Assn.

Where Policy Meets Science

Firefighters like Cooper don’t need statistics to tell them things have changed. Seconds after he and the crew of Fire Co. No. 82 had yanked on overalls and climbed on the engine’s folding seats, they were screaming down Franklin Avenue, honking at confused motorists.

But they had hardly reached Cahuenga Avenue when Cooper switched off the sirens. “Smoke scare from a barbecue” came his voice over the headphones. The crew kept their places but seemed to slump a little in their seats.

Twenty years ago, L.A. firefighters were often rousted from their beds twice a night to fight fires. Nowadays, the members of Fire Station No. 82, in the heart of fire-prone Hollywood, might see flames twice a week.

“I kind of miss it, although that’s awful to say,” said Battalion Chief Doug Barry, recalling the warehouse fires that used to light up the sky and send the adrenaline flowing.

“We are kind of putting ourselves out of business,” he said.

The steady pace of conquest over one of the most terrifying hazards of urban life is a case of government doing something right.

It is a realm where policy and science have met and clicked, where social progress has marched ahead without revolution, radicals or heroes.

For the decline in fires, thank nameless bureaucrats, schoolteachers, building inspectors and engineers. Thank product designers and fire physicists, who to this day torch furniture and appliances in government labs to test their safety.

Thank firefighters, who despite what one fire official calls their “aw shucks culture” have been veritable crusaders for changing the urban environment.

Firefighters now spend threefold as much time on an ever-increasing number of emergency medical runs as any other type of call. They get twice as many false alarms as real fires.

More and more, they train for catastrophes they hope never to see, such as nuclear fires and terrorist attacks. Some, like Cooper, worry that conventional firefighting skills are getting rusty.

Big fires still occur of course. Veteran Los Angeles fire Capt. Joseph C. Dupee died while fighting just such an industrial building inferno in March. But he was the first city firefighter to perish in 14 years, and for the most part fires today are smaller and less threatening--smoldering ovens, not flame-engulfed buildings.

‘A Peacetime Army’ Tries to Stay Sharp

At Fire Station No. 82, firefighter Christopher Contreras recounted a list of recent calls in the Hollywood district:

“Stuck elevators . . . people locked out . . . people locked in bathrooms . . . babies locked in cars,” he said, ticking them off on his fingers. “Flooded basements . . . leaking natural gas . . . wires down . . . rattlesnakes . . . boa constrictors.”

Fire experts still fault the U.S. for not decreasing the number of fires to the levels of other Western countries. But even the most critical of them say America’s progress in preventing fires has been stunning. They credit education and reforms, from smoke detectors to fire-retardant mattresses.

“There is, at rock bottom, a certain clarity about fire,” said John Hall, a statistics expert for the National Fire Protection Assn. People may argue endlessly about the right approach to crime or pollution, “but if you’ve got a fire,” he said, “you want it out as soon as possible.”

Fire prevention has become so sophisticated that experts now talk of the possibility of virtually fire-free cities.

In Scottsdale, Ariz., where fire codes are so strict that sprinklers are required in every room, even the confessional boxes in Catholic churches, entire districts of the city are effectively fireproof.

Working in Scottsdale, said local firefighter Colin Williams, “is a very boring job.”

Even L.A.’s Fire Department sometimes resembles “a peacetime army,” said William R. Bamattre, the fire chief. Like the post-Cold War military, the fire service struggles to stay prepared, keep up morale and convince politicians to maintain current levels of support, he said.

“Fire service is a misnomer,” Bamattre said. “It’s really a safety service.”

The decline in fires has brought new respect to fire prevention, long considered among the least glamorous of fire service jobs.

Bill Goss, a retired L.A. city deputy chief, remembers being razzed mercilessly by buddies in the 1950s when he made the unheard-of move from firefighting to fire prevention.

A few years later, the laughter stopped. One friend finally complained, “Bill, you are gonna ruin the fire service, you and your fire prevention.”

Fire prevention is a humble art. In the U.S., it has largely taken the form of fire education in grade school--Sparky the Fire Dog-type campaigns that have taught thousands of American children simple maxims such as “Don’t play with matches.”

It’s telling that the National Fire Protection Assn., the nation’s largest prevention group, has lately shifted to teaching safe boating and bicycling as well as fire prevention.

Building codes, product safety laws and fire safety standards have also revolutionized the fire problem.

Fire retardant mattresses, required since 1974, have taken a bite out of the most deadly kind of fire: the one that combines a burning cigarette, a drunken, snoring smoker, and a bed.

Smoke detectors are now in 93% of homes (although it’s estimated that a quarter aren’t working). From a safety standpoint, the devices are a no-brainer, reducing your chance of dying in a fire by half.

Los Angeles firefighters played a key role in the history of detectors. Back in the 1970s, they deliberately burned hundreds of homes left vacant by the LAX expansion, using them as test sites to develop smoke detector technology.

Still known as “The L.A. Experiments” in fire literature, the tests remain the basis for detector standards worldwide, Hall said.

There are countless other less-noticeable changes. Fire code manuals at Los Angeles fire headquarters that used to take up one shelf now fill walls. Sprinklers, enclosed stairways, fire doors and new requirements for chemical storage and building exits have all chipped away at the fire statistics.

The codes read like a bibliography of catastrophic fires. Earlier in this century, death by fire was six times as common as it is today. Even in 1979 there were 7,575 civilian fire deaths in the U.S. In 1994, the last year for which the Fire Protection Assn. has reported figures, the number was 4,275.

Disasters in mines and nightclubs on the scale of the Oklahoma City bombing once happened every few years.

But reforms have followed fires like memorials. Names such as Cocoanut Grove (492 dead) and Hartford Circus (168 dead) are to fire prevention what landmark cases are to the law.

Some reforms have virtually wiped out whole categories of fires.

After 95 people died in the 1958 Our Lady of Angels School fire in Chicago, school fire codes were revamped.

Since then, not a single U.S. school fire has killed more than 10 people, Hall said.

It’s not hard to see why deadly fires are such a potent force for change, say firefighters: Fires have a way of breeding fanaticism.

Asked about the phenomenon, L.A. battalion chief Barry recalled L.A.’s Dorothy Mae Hotel fire of Sept. 4, 1982. The predawn fire killed 24 people. Barry was called to clear out the bodies.

“In the rear exit, there were 10 to 15 people piled up,” he said. “Piled up, you know? They were all piled up against the door. You don’t forget that.”

City leaders didn’t forget either. The subsequent “Dorothy Mae” ordinance required that apartments and hotels in Los Angeles install additional sprinklers. Today, L.A. firefighters spend as much time sweeping water as they do behind the hoses, Bamattre said.

Attempts to Cut Blazes Even Further

Although the changes are impressive, some say the country is still plagued by preventable fire deaths, some 4,000 yearly.

The rates are still about 25% higher than in other Western nations, said international fire consultant Philip Schaenman.

And the pace of change has not always been impressive. Take fire sprinklers, a simple, relatively cheap fix to many kinds of fire hazards.

They debuted in the 1890s. One hundred years later, less than two-thirds of L.A.’s commercial buildings are in compliance with the municipal sprinkler ordinance, said Ed Sanchez, chief city plumbing inspector.

Enforcement is a gaping hole in the system. Some of the worst fire disasters of recent decades were the fault of illegal practices. In Los Angeles, illegally converted garages and bars on windows continue to kill.

“The biggest obstacle,” Hall said, “is people who believe fire won’t happen to them.”

So far, the changes are sufficient to have thoroughly transformed the fire service. Bamattre is busy restructuring his department to keep pace.

He wants to keep the city’s legendary, aggressive tactics for squelching structure fires intact, he said. But at the same time, his budget is strained by the addition of new functions such as swift-water rescue. He must also contend with cultural tensions within the department as firefighters evolve into medics and sophisticated maintenance workers.

Back at Fire Station No. 82, firefighters still talk wistfully about the excitement of fighting blazes--the thrill of the attack and the camaraderie in the aftermath.

Their spouses are happier with fewer fires, they say. But for themselves, they sound a little ambivalent.

“No one wants to get up at 3 a.m. and go on an EMS call,” said firefighter Frank Aguirre, settling into a chair after the smoking-barbecue call.

The increasingly common sight of a firetruck responding to emergency medical calls is in part a sign of changing times in the fire service. More and more, firefighters are trained both as firefighters and paramedics. If a medical call comes into a station that does not have full-time paramedics, the firefighters roll using the vehicles they have on hand--firetrucks. Within a few years, every city fire station is expected to have paramedics among their fire crews, fire officials say.

Such calls “are part of the job,” Aguirre said. “But when you join the department, you join because it says you’re going to be a fireman. Being a fireman, that’s what the job’s about.”

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Dying Down

The number of structure fires per year has been decreasing even as the population increases. In the city of Los Angeles, the number of fires has fallen sharply, although the city’s population has expanded by one-third in 20 years.

Source: NFPA survey