There has been quite a bit of talk about home fires in this thread - in part relating to wooden build houses, of course. Which made me wonder, just as an aside to the main arguments - is home fire really a greater risk in the US than elsewhere?
First - this isn’t about Our-Houses-Are-Better-Than-Your-Houses - I was just minded to wonder what the figures actually are.
Second - I don’t pretend this is anything more than very crude (but it was reasonably quick to do). As a marker for fire risk, I was able to find some recent stats on fire fatalities for the US and the UK. (Actually, the stats are for England, but I’m guessing pretty representative of the UK). So:
This gives the 2017 total US fatalities (3400). It wasn’t so easy to find a similar handy stat for the UK, but if you check out “Primary fires fatalities and non-fatal casualties in dewllings (0202)” in this you can mine the data in the “Data FR Fatalities” tab. My total for the last complete year (2017/8) was 263. Actually, this figure is inflated for the year by a single incident, the Grenfell Tower fire (see row 2637 - 72 people died in a single fire).
Population of the US - I have 327.2M; population of England - 55.6M.
I make that 10.4 deaths per million in the US and 4.7 deaths per million in England/UK, annually. If you take out the Grenfell deaths, that drops to 3.4 for England/UK.
I suspect there are a couple of other factors at play in US vs UK fire deaths, notably the fire department response times and the locations of the closest available ER/burn unit. I am not aware of anywhere in the UK that relies solely on volunteer fire firefighters, for example, but huge swathes of rural and outer-suburban America depend upon volunteers summoned from their paying jobs by pager.
The number of fires and fire deaths in the US has plummeted over the past forty years; the National Fire Protection Association shows an average of about 5700 deaths per year in the early 1980s, versus around 3100 per year by the mid-2010s, for a rate averaging 9.7 fire deaths per million people. However, there remains a very substantial regional disparity, with state rates from ranging from a low of 3.9/million in highly-urbanized Utah to a high of 24.4/million in still-mostly-rural West Virginia. (cite)
There’s also a lot of research (see here, e.g.) on the effect of new building materials and new construction norms. For example, big open floor plans let fires spread rapidly, while the proliferation of synthetic fibers and petroleum-based products also leads to more rapid spread of fires.
However, a bigger concern is that new building materials don’t have the same margin of error as traditional materials. Dimensional lumber retained some integrity even as it started to char and lose mass, but lightweight and engineered products don’t have surplus mass; as soon as they start losing mass, they start to fail.
Yeah - I did say that it was a very crude measure. The urban vs rural stat is striking, though; that said, then you have to ask what proportion of the US population is urbanised, and by the time we’re heading that way we probably need to start another thread.
Anyway, what I really came back to say was:
Not quite sure exactly what you mean (“relies solely”), but I live in a fair sized town with a “professional” fire station; yet my nearest “volunteer” fire station is less than five miles away. My erstwhile brother in law was a volunteer fire fighter. This site (which is actually about ethnicity in fire services) suggests that about a third of firefighters in the UK are “retained” (volunteers).
What I mean by “relies solely” is that the entire department has no fulltime professional staff. In vast swathes of the country, the nearest “professional” fire station that is manned full-time may be a hundred miles away and be wholly separate.
It is my understanding that in the UK, there are 40 or 50 fire services that are more-or-less independent and self-governing. In the United States, there are around 30,000, of which 65% have no paid staff at all. (cite)
This website suggests most retained firefighters in the UK contract to provide a certain number of hours of coverage each week, are paid for being on-call, and are contractually obligated to report to the fire station within five minutes of the call going out. Most US volunteer firefighters aren’t paid anything and don’t make contractual commitments (which means for example that a late-night fire will have a lot of firefighters show up, but far fewer show up at midday when they’re at work or school or otherwise engaged, potentially many miles away from their station).
This isn’t referring to a contractual obligation. What it means is, when 5 minutes are up, so long as a minimum number of firefighters have made it to the station (3, if I remember correctly), the appliance leaves. If you’re not there, you don’t ride. If you missed every call there would be an issue, obviously, but the system is pragmatic (like, you are allowed to have a bath…).
But the point I was making was that the US and UK systems are not so very dissimilar. As your cite says
They are paid, but not much. Not many people are doing this for the money. RefRef.
Anyway - to return to the OP, here’s another way of looking at fire data. Again, a very crude analysis:
Number of US Households 127.59M (2018) ref
Number of UK households 27.2M (2018) ref
Number of US home fires 357 000 (2017) ref
Number of UK home fires 37 000 (no specific date) ref
The rate of house fires in the US appears to be about twice that of the UK. (I don’t like some of those refs but I’m too tired to find better ones just now.)
As to how this relates to quality and type of build - it would be nice to have more information. But interesting, no?
Not enough data to be meaningful. As noted upthread, a house fire is fueled by the things inside a house, not the way the house is constructed. The only times I can think of where construction could be a factor are shoddy electrical work, and non-fireproof roofing or siding/cladding which could sustain a fire from an external source (anything from lightning strikes to arson.)
I find wood easier to remodel and update. I know its hard to put an electrical outlet into a brick wall (lathe and plaster are even worse) whereas with wood it just goes behind the drywall into a hollow space.
Its also harder to run pipes and VERY hard to dig holes large enough to run heating and cooling ductwork. Those old cast iron pipes will need replacing.
Old houses didnt have modern basements one would expect to be dry and usable as a living space. They were more like cellars and are difficult to keep water out of.
Yes, todays houses have garages out front but in the old days people didnt have cars or maybe only one so they didnt need them. Now we do.
So essentially yes, houses back in the day were made to last but are difficult to update to modern standards and aesthetics.
I’d like to add that module homes, or basically homes built offsite then moved in pieces to a site and then final construction, often are better built than homes built from scratch on site. For one, they are built indoors so no worry about wet wood. Then they have to be built stronger in order to handle transportation.
Also the same crews build each one whereas for a home well this one crew might start this then another finished because everyone from the first crew quit and then someone else comes along and does the plumbing and so on.
And then their is construction time. They can build most of the home off site so once the foundation is poured and ready they can bring in the pieces and quickly put them all together in maybe a week. Whereas a typical home takes 2-3 months to build and all that time weather is a factor.
Back to the OP, what good is a 200 year old home if you cannot update it to modern needs? Years ago thats partly why many wealthy families abandoned the big mansions built by their grandparents. They were just too darn expensive to update and repair.
I’m having enough trouble updating a homes electrical grid that was built in the 70’s and I have all these ungrounded outlets.
That’s sort of like the style of subdivision popular in the greater Dallas area in the 1960s through 1990s,(and probably elsewhere, I suppose, but not Austin or Houston) where the houses fronted the street, with only a pedestrian walkway out to the sidewalk/street, while there is an alley in the back that the garage faced out onto. Everything looks really nice from the street, and the alley is where the aesthetically displeasing garages face. Think Hank’s neighborhood in “King of the Hill” actually…
And the wood-framed houses are tougher than they look; in general most of the real damage from hurricanes along the Gulf Coast seems to be from storm surge (if you live right near the coast), flooding and trees uprooting or branches breaking off. Some shingles may blow off, but it’s not terribly common, and it’s usually relatively minor.
I can appreciate the aesthetic of having the garage tucked behind the house and there are even some houses with that design in my neighborhood. But in the winter they have 3x the amount of driveway to clear snow from and I bet that gets old.
I have a detached garage in the back of my house and I wish greatly that it were in the front for most of the reasons people have mentioned.
A full 10’ wide swath of my property from the front to the rear is mostly wasted because it has to be kept clear for car traffic. I can’t plant anything in it or put out patio furniture. It’s just an empty road. I have a larger than average suburban lot, but what a waste.
The bedrooms in the front of the house are closer to the road, and thus louder. A there would provide some nice sound insulation.
As we approach a possible post-individual-vehicle future, an attached front garage could be easily and cheaply converted to more living space, the detached one is going to be more awkward and expensive.
All of those far outweigh the fact that the house might not look as nice from the front in my opinion. And adding some cosmetic improvements to a front-garage is far less expensive than the wasted space.
But I don’t think that’s what the average suburban resident wants. Take my previously described house.
The front yard is small without a real porch to speak of. We park in the driveway and use the front door for egress, but most of our neighbors enter and exit in their cars through the garage. No one is hanging out on a front porch. No one wants to socialize or interact with their neighbors. The front window, which in an older home would be the living room window, is the window of a secondary bedroom.
The main living area of the house is located in the back, away from the street. These rooms, which feature large windows and porches, overlook a spacious and totally private fenced back yard. The concept is privacy, not community. The back yard is important and pretty. The front of the house is unimportant and ugly. But no one cares. But me, a little bit, because I come from an urban environment and I don’t like not knowing my neighbors. It feels weird to me. But lifelong suburbanites like it.
I’ve only seen this street/alley combination in Dallas- most places I’ve been have the street, with driveways leading up to the garage from the street.
I’m of mixed feelings about it; on one hand, it does make the view from the street more pleasant- no driveways and no curbside mailboxes in my neighborhood. On the other, it means that your back fence has to be more presentable than otherwise, since everyone driving through the alley can see it.
As for community, it’s a mixed bag. On one hand, if you’re out there doing something in your garage/backyard, it’s not hard for your neighbors behind/beside you to see what’s up and say hi. On the other, there is ZERO front-yard interaction- there’s no reason to go out in the front yard except to get the newspaper, unless you park out there.
That depends on your suburb. As I said above, I grew up in suburbia. My parents still live in one (a different one than the one I grew up in. I’ve never lived there.)
They’ve always known all their neighbors. Talked with them, helped them out, had people over for dinner or drinks (and vice versa), had neighborhood parties and get togethers, etc. And my parents are not outgoing, extroverted people. That’s just the way the neighborhoods worked.
While I (who live in an urban environment) think of my next-door neighbor (who has lived there for years) as “not Kevin” because he looks like a guy I used to know named Kevin, but that’s not his name. We both smile and half wave when I run into him in the hallway.
When I replaced the roof on my house after I bought it (with asphalt shingles), they were actually warrantied for 50 years. Maybe if I had really tried I could have found some really cheap only warrantied for 20, but it seemed like 50 year shingles were the standard product all the roofing companies were selling. I’m guessing the 20 year thing is outdated now and the quality of roofing products, even asphalt shingles, has improved compared to what it was decades ago.
A couple of years ago the suburb next to mine passed an ordinance that the garage could comprise no more than 45% of the front of the house.
My parents lived in a split-level (I believe they’re now called split-foyer) house with the garage on one level with the living/dining/kitchen area above it, and the entrance on the other level with the family room on that level and the bedrooms above.
Heh. In this part of the US it only gets that warm six months of the year. On October 25, 2018 the temperature dropped to 7.2C and, other than a handful of days one day at a time it didn’t reach 10C until April 6, 2019 and it wasn’t until May 16, 2019 that it reached 15C for a whole week without falling back into the 50s…um 7s?..again.
As for humidity, it’s at least 30% humidity all winter. That’s nothing compared to the summer when - except so far this summer - it’s almost always 80-100% humidity night and day, but it’s enough to put a chill in your bones for sure, especially when it’s wet and -6C out for a week.
And that’s just a typical winter - in 2015 the average temperature for the whole month of February in the northern part of New England was −10.1C here in New Hampshire and −14.3C in central Maine. This happens every few winters.
Anyway, if we built for 10-15C conditions, we’d either go bankrupt trying to heat our homes or literally freeze to death.