NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 30

Five years ago,
in the months after 72 people were killed in a fire
in the Grenfell Tower in West London, citizens and
media throughout Europe began raising questions
about the effectiveness of fire regulations across the
continent. Why was a 24-story apartment building
in one of the richest countries in the world not
equipped with fire sprinklers? How was Grenfell's
highly combustible façade, which caused a column
of flames to quickly ascend and surround the structure,
allowed to be installed?
Inquiries were launched. Governments raced to
learn how many Grenfell-like buildings existed in
their countries. And the European Union Parliament
met in Brussels to ask its own broader questions
about regulations, strategies, and risks among its
27 member states.
Very quickly, however, officials came up against a
hard truth: objectively measuring anything fire-related
in Europe was nearly impossible. Despite
member nations sharing open borders and political
and monetary systems, many vestiges of their
pre-EU national bureaucracies remained firmly
intact, including wide-ranging differences in how
each nation handled the collection and management
of national and regional fire data.
From Portugal to Estonia, little to no consistency
exists around what data is collected after a fire,
whose job it is to collect it, how it is analyzed, and
where or if it is reported. " Generally, there is not
even consensus between countries in the EU about
how to define what a fire incident is, " said Martina
Manes, a fire data researcher and professor at
the University of Liverpool in England. Under the
circumstances, measuring the fire problem across
Europe was at best challenging, and effective cooperation
around fire policy seemed like a pipe dream.
But the EU also knew it had a problem it couldn't
afford to ignore. Although harmonizing the data collection
efforts of 27 nations with 27 unique ways
of measuring their fire problems would amount to
an unprecedented task, the EU's unique political
arrangement seemed to make it an ideal test case.
In late 2019, the European Commission, part of
the EU's executive branch, issued a proposal for a
project it called EU FireStat. It asked a consortium
of nine universities and organizations from around
the globe, including NFPA, to undertake a massive
fact-finding mission to learn what types of fire data
each EU country collects and how, and then devise
a common system of minimum requirements that
could be shared by all.
A report on the ambitious project reveals fascinating
insights about the challenges and often
maddening complexities of fire data collection. It
holds promise, experts believe, not only for the
future of fire safety in the EU, but possibly as a
30 | NFPA JOURNAL * WINTER 2022
blueprint for fire data collection around the world.
" What we have proposed here, any country can
take it and implement it. That's what makes it so
cool, " said Birgitte Messerschmidt, the director of
research at NFPA and a key contributor to the EU
FireStat project.
LESS GUESSWORK,
MORE SCIENCE
While it's tempting to regard Europe's Tower-of-Babel
data problem as the exception, the fact is it's closer
to the rule across much of the globe, researchers
say. Some countries, like those in Scandinavia, collect
vast quantities of data, while many developing
nations collect literally nothing at all, a predicament
that can leave regulators with significant blind spots.
Even when nations or regions do collect the same
NFPA Journal - Winter 2022

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