Fire and Science

As society advances, its values depend on what is produced and those sources of production. However, as the means to acquire products becomes easier, values turn inward to the general societal welfare and our environment. Uncontrolled fire can devastate our assets and production sources, and this relates to the societal costs of fire prevention and loss restoration. The effects of fire on people and the environment become social issues that depend on the political ideology and economics that prevail in the state. Thus, attention to fire prevention and control depend on its perceived damage potential and our social values in the state. While these issues have faced all cultures, perhaps the twentieth century ultimately provided the basis for addressing fire with proper science in the midst of significant social and technological advances, especially among the developed countries. 

In a modern society, the investment in fire safety depends on the informed risk. Reliable risk must be based on complete statistics. An important motivator of the US government s interest to address the large losses due to fire in the early 1970s was articulated in the report of the National Commission on Fire Prevention and Control (.America Burning [1]). It stated that the US annually sustained over 11 billion in lost 

Fundamentals of Fire Phenomena James G. Quintiere 2006 John Wiley Sons, Ltd ISBN 0-470-09113-4 

Over the last 500 years, science has progressed at an accelerating pace from the beginnings of mathematical generality to a full set of conservation principles needed to address most problems. Yet fire, one of the earliest tools of mankind, needed the last 50 years to give it mathematical expression. Fire is indeed complex and that surely helped to retard its scientific development. But first, what is fire How shall we define it  

1906 San Francisco earthquake (those that were there, call it the fire ), 28 000 buildings lost, 450 dead, 300 million due to fire ( 5 billion, 1993), 15 million due to earthquake damage [4] 

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