Mapping Home Fire Risk to Save Lives

Each year more than 2,500 Americans lose their lives to home fires. The 360,000+ home fires that occur each year seriously injure more than 13,000 people and cause over $7 billion in property damage. Approximately 23 percent of U.S. households have no or non-working smoke alarms; these same households account for 60 percent of home fire related deaths. Many of these tragedies are easily preventable. Simply having a working smoke alarm increases survivability in a home fire by up to 50 percent. In response to this, the Red Cross, in partnership with the DC chapter of DataKind, created the Home Fire Risk Map- a data science project to identify and map at-risk communities in order to target interventions to those who need it most. In this talk, I will demo the latest release of the map as well as review the underlying models that power it.

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