This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A decade of New York City fire data shows that citywide trends can mask sharply different realities on the ground, with some neighborhoods moving in the opposite direction of the city as a whole. A new study published in the Fire Safety Journal breaks down more than 411,000 structural fire incidents recorded by the FDNY between 2013 and 2023 across roughly 2,200 census tracts, small statistical subdivisions of a few thousand residents each, rather than the borough- or citywide figures typically used to track fire trends.
Hannah Bonestroo, a Ph.D. student in Urban Systems at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, conducted the research with assistant professor Augustin Guibaud, a faculty member of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering affiliated with NYU Tandon's Center for Urban Science + Progress. "If the city is looking at inequalities at the neighborhood scale, or allocating resources at the neighborhood scale, there may be areas with different patterns that get missed," said Bonestroo. At the citywide level, the story looked simple.
Structural fires fell 11.3% over the decade, a clear improvement. But that average hid real variation underneath it. "If you look much more granularly at the census tract level, there were hot spots, areas where fires were actually increasing over the 10 years," said Bonestroo.
Eastern Queens and Staten Island were among the places moving against the citywide trend. Response time showed a different pattern entirely, forming large clusters of similar trends across the city rather than concentrating in pockets. Average response time rose 30 seconds over the decade, from 4 minutes 6 seconds to 4 minutes 36 seconds, now exceeding the National Fire Protection Association's 4-minute travel-time standard.
"In a fire, every second counts," said Guibaud. "Thirty seconds may not sound like much, but it can be enough time for a fire to intensify and for smoke to fill a space, and the first crew on scene can arrive to a situation that's already beyond what they can handle." "Almost the entire city is following the pattern of it increasing," Bonestroo said, a contrast to fire frequency, which varied sharply block to block. Northwestern Queens saw the sharpest deterioration in response time over the decade.
Recent reviews by the FDNY and the New York State Senate have pointed to traffic congestion and rising call volume—the department responds to more than a million emergency calls a year—rather than neighborhood demographics or distance from firehouses. The researchers' analysis agrees, as fixed socioeconomic and built-environment factors explained only about a quarter of the differences in response time between tracts. That contrast pointed to a second finding.
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