The general population tends to blame the Fire Department of New York (FDNY)‘s response times as the primary reason for injury and death in New York City fires (Guart). Using data from FDNY Vital Statistics, arguments made by Dr. Scott Gabriel Knowles in his book The Disaster Experts, and public opinion as represented in newspaper articles, our research seeks to establish the proportion of risk that response times encompass in contrast to simultaneously operating factors leading to injury and death in NYC fire incidents. These factors include adherence to building codes and EMS response times. Many of the buildings in NYC are privately owned. As such, they are exempt from following the same codes publicly owned buildings must follow (Knowles, 12-13). While examining the data set from NYC Open Data we discovered a gap throwing the source into an unreliable light. Discrepancies in purportedly government-issued open-sourced data potentially calls into question the validity of the data set. Identifying discrepancies also introduces the question of why the New York City government would publicly display inaccurate information.
http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/seminar3posters/files/gravity_forms/1-f14ea90e75361cb91bd42582a860ee01/2014/12/Examining-Risk-Fire-Death-and-Underlying-Factors.pdf
Marisa Balbo, Kayla Talbot
David Munns, Kevin Ambrose
John Jay College
risk, fire, death
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