A new report by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) concludes that from 2004 through 2008, 23% of the responses by local fire departments were to vegetation fires. The report does not include fires handled by state and federal agencies.
The report breaks down vegetation fires into some strange, overlapping, and unnecessary sub-groups, so some of the actual numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt. Here is how they break it down:
- Forest, woods, or wildland fire
- Brush, or brush and grass mixture
- Grass fire
- Unclassified natural vegetation fire
Here is an excerpt from the report:
Having been a volunteer then career member of a small rural FD, I have to emphasis the ‘garbage in-garbage out’ nature of incident reporting. NFIRS, collected by the USFA, is not used much by your average rural dept, as it is cumbersome as heck. Won’t go into lack of time/ability to really investigate an ignition, get a true acreage for wildfire, or estimate damages. I wish we had good stats on fires overall but can’t take these very seriously