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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

There's a reason for that. My father in law was a fireman who retired as chief after 45 years.

Fires are rare today -- but were incredibly common during the 60s and 70s. He was at an average of two a week in those days. It was common enough that insurance companies had "protectives" who were firemen to go in and pull out your furniture.

Fire is rare because of those codes today.

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Plus, insurance fraud was at an all time high, detecting accelerants was very difficult, people smoked in bed, people smoked everywhere. As a kid, all I remember is adults lighting cigarettes. My job was stomping out the butts.

Source:watching Goodfellas, and that movie with Bull--forget the name--Backdraft.

You need a source on HN when quoting childhood memories?

The introduction of smoke detectors (the typical 9V battery driven type didn't show up until the 70s) likely helped quite a bit.

From following the local fire brigade it seems that the most common source of alarms is people forgetting a frying pan or similar.

Does the reduction in smoking in our culture (especially smoking in public) have any bearing on fewer fires?

A slight decline for smoking materials but a big decline for 'matches' over the past 5 years in the UK, according to data. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/fire-sta...

Even 60's were safe compared to earlier centuries. It used to be common for whole cities to burn down. And again we can thank the codes.

The development of pressurized water systems and thus the ability to quickly extinguish fires likely had a pretty significant impact.

The first Steam-pump fire engines only came into (very limited) use in the 1850s and ICE pumpers in the early 1900s.

Fire codes at the time required wide paved streets to act as fire barriers. You get double benefit when you can get your fire engine to the desired location by that new fat street.

And then again reinforced concrete also became available around 1900.

So yes, the code is only small part of all that. But I'd claim it's significant part.

Electrical lighting made a huge difference in fire safety.

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