Sandra Albanese

Fires have the potential to cause fatality, injury, or financial loss as a result of damage to personal or commercial property. The evaluation of high risk areas is critical in targeting risk prevention strategies. The exploration of spatial patterns of crime and health-related incidence is well-established. More recently, spatial techniques that have commonly been used for the analysis of crime and health-related incidence has been extended to fire incidence, especially in the United Kingdom and United States. However, similar research is lacking in Canada. The purpose of this research was to contribute to the growing research of examining the spatial patterns of fire incidence, through the examination of the spatial relationships between electrical fire incidence and socioeconomic characteristics within a Canadian context. By examining the spatial patterns of electrical fires for residential and non-residential incident data, hotspot areas were identified in the Greater Toronto Area. Using multivariate regression and decision tree analyses, it was demonstrated that socioeconomic characteristics cannot be directly associated with electrical fire incidents spatially. Even though there was a lack of direct spatial relationship for the GTA, there is still a strong visual relationship in Toronto with a similar U-shaped pattern as that of low income. The visual representation of fire incidence in the GTA will be useful for fire prevention strategies by the Office of the Fire Marshal by targeting areas where higher than average levels of fire incidence have been shown to recur. Also, ESA, working together with the OFM and other safety agencies can use these maps to develop strategies and solutions to focus on areas where the rates of electrical safety incidents can be reduced. Further research may include a detailed spatial examination by the various fire types independently, possibly using different statistical techniques such as Ordinary Least Square Regression and Geographically Weighted Regression. There is great potential research with this dataset since it has the strength of being a true representative dataset of the GTA (and Ontario), as opposed to a random sample of a larger dataset. Further research will enable a continued effort is required by safety agencies such as ESA, researchers, the Ontario Fire Marshal’s office and the public to increase education and prevention and further decrease the risk of fire in the GTA and in Ontario.