The Traffic Accident Reconstruction Origin -ARnews-


Re: car accident fires

Bob Cole (rpcole@ican.ca)
Tue, 7 Jul 1998 02:10:28 -0400 (EDT)

My experience has also been that very few vehicles actually catch fire.
>From the 1996 FARS data:
Search Results 1996 Statistics (if I did the query correctly and understand the numbers correctly)
Number of Crashes: 1,307 (fire involved) 37,494 (total # fatal crashes)
Number of Vehicles: 1,462 (fire involved) 57,347 (total # fatal crashes)
Number of Persons: 2,393 (fire involved) 103,347(total # fatal crashes)

The math works out to:
3.4% of fatal crashes involve a fire
2.5% of vehicles involved in fatal crashes have a fire
Remember these are fatal stats only which tend to be higher speed crashes. Crashes in general are going to have much lower fire numbers.

Bob Cole
rpcole@ican.ca


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