Rising Alarm

Deaths in home fires are going up. Experts blame flammable foam and plastic, new home design and developer resistance to sprinklers

- MATT CLARK

AFTER YEARS OF EXPERTS WARNING THAT THE proliferation of furniture foam and plastic was making home fires more deadly, a multidecade trend in declining home fire deaths has reversed itself. The number of U.S. home fire deaths reached a 14-year high in 2021, according to the most recent National Fire Protection Association data.

Furniture foam, furniture plastics and other oil-based, synthetic furnishings and building products burn rapidly and quickly fill homes with toxic smoke, reducing the time to escape to less than four minutes from more than 30 minutes in the past, studies have shown.

Experts point first to the proliferation of synthetics in homes as an explanation for the increasing fire deaths, but also cite differences in how homes are designed. They have warned for years the trends would make fires more deadly and erode large gains made from smoke alarms and other safety measures.

"When you sit on the couch, you're essentially sitting on a block of gasoline. So, the fires have gotten hotter, they've gotten faster, and they've gotten more toxic," Maryland State Fire Marshal Brian S. Geraci says.

Home design also has played a role, experts say, with open-concept designs featuring fewer walls and doors giving synthetic-fueled fires the oxygen and freedom they need to move swiftly. Homes also have gotten larger, with multiple stories putting more space between occupants and exits than the ranch or split-level homes of the past.

"If you see how fast the fire develops, you also know that unless the fire department is almost right next door, they will not make it there in time," Birgitte Messerschmidt, research director of the National Fire Protection Association, says. "The fire department used to show up to a fire in a house, and now they show up to a house on fire."