I completely agree with him about being prepared, that's why we have Smoke detectors in every room and hallway. I do need to add a CO detector, although we don't use gas in the house so it would be hard for us to get any. We also have fire extinguishers (note to self, we need more) However this is not the purpose of my post.
I'll quit babbling and get to the point. A couple years ago I read (I believe in an NRA magazine) that a person was more likely to be the victim of violent crime than a house fire. I used to use the figures in my class and have since forgotten what the numbers were. So....since I couldn't sleep and woke up early thinking about this I did some digging. Just to be clear, we need to be prepared for everything we can fires and crimes among other things.
In my digging here is what I got:
( I used 2009 since there was data available )
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report in 2009
With Total Population of 307,006,550
There were:
429.4 violent crimes per 100,000 in the US
3036 Property Crimes per 100,0000
716.3 Burglarys per 100,000 and
133 Roberies per 100,000
According to the 2009 Census as quoted by Answer.com
In 2009 there were
91,241,000 Single Detached and Manf. Homes
if you count ALL housing units there were 130,159,000
In 2009 there were 480,000 structure fires
That number was not broken down into types of structures but I will use it any way.
So let's take the number of all housing units and all structure fires.
130,159,000 dwellings devided by 100,000 =1301
480,500 fires devided by 1301= 369 per 100,000
I feel like I am in math class. LOL Just posting my work so you guys can clue me in if I am wrong. It's early and I am not a mathmatician.
So by my figures there were :
429.4 violent crimes per 100,000 people and
369 fires per 100,000 Housing Units
I know the fire number would be lower if we had the actual house fire figure instead of the "structure" fire number. I will continue to look for it. I would also like to know the number of people involved in each fire to get a number of how many people per 100,000 were affected. Obviously I have more work to do.
Unfortunately both numbers are high, so be prepared and be careful out there.